


Branches

by Evidence



Category: Epic (2013)
Genre: F/M, MK-as-queen, it's all Mandrake's fault, sort of, things go awry
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-13
Updated: 2015-03-19
Packaged: 2017-12-29 06:32:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 25,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1002095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Evidence/pseuds/Evidence
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The pod blooms in darkness.  The results are not quite what Mandrake had been hoping for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Nightbloom

**Author's Note:**

> Fair warning, I'm not completely sure that I'm going to be able to find the time to complete this fic in a swift or consistent manner. Usually I don't post WIP's, but I feel like this first chapter can almost stand on its own, in a way, so I don't feel too badly about it this time. If/when I get the chance to do more, I'll do my best to finish it.

_Dad!_ MK thinks, as she rushes towards the nearest bird, giving the sword she’d grabbed to the nearest Leafman.  Her dad knows how to call bats.  She reaches for the saddle.  If she can get to him in time –

 

Something large and dark crashes into her, knocking both her and the bird backwards in a flurry of feathers.  She slams into the stone floor.  There is a terrible, horrible shrieking in her ears, followed by a single, shrill cry of anguish.  A bat, she realizes.  A bat with her hummingbird in its jaws.

 

The bird goes limp.  A figure swings down from the back of the bat, and MK struggles to get to her feet.

 

Mandrake.

 

Grub and Mub rush him.  With an almost negligent motion, Mandrake slams the butt of his staff down into the floor.  Ribbons of petrified wood burst, like overflowing rivers, in outward spirals.  They toss the slug and snail aside.  MK is thrown off of her feet again as another wave comes, this one crashing into Nim as well.

 

“Ah, there he is; my little prince-to-be,” Mandrake enthuses, striding towards the pod, and the altar.

 

Mostly ignored, MK turns towards the entryway.  The last remaining Leafmen guards are being decimated by Mandrake’s entourage.  With a sinking feeling, she knows she will never get past them.  And even if she could, she thinks, _knows,_ that whatever remaining time they may have had, it’s just run out.  Their only hope now is that the Leafmen will be able to clear enough of an opening for the moonlight to break through at the last minute – but even if they succeed, Mandrake will still be down _here_ , ready to move the pod, maybe, if the light begins to creep through.  To make sure it never blooms in the light.

 

MK gets to her feet again.

 

And she charges.

 

She isn’t even sure what she’s thinking, except that she absolutely needs to get this dirtbag away from the pod.  It would be a bad plan, if it even qualified as a plan and not just a visceral reaction.

 

It’s weird, but, when the pod’s little vines had first crept around her arms, when Queen Tara had handed it to her, part of her had felt like it was _hers._   And yet even in that same moment, she knew that it wasn’t hers at all.  Or maybe just that it _shouldn’t_ be.  She would never say that she wants it, exactly, but something deep and primal, something at the very core of her, absolutely refuses to let Mandrake have it, either.

 

Crashing into him is like hitting a brick wall.  He smells like rot and must, rancid and stale at the same time.  It’s laughably easy for him to shrug her off.

 

“Ugh.  Where do you peons keep _coming_ from?” he demands.

 

MK manages to stay on her feet, manages to keep a grip on his cloak.  She yanks, and he raises his staff, and it happens so fast that she doesn’t even have time to react, really.  He just hits her.  Square in the chest, right over her breast, with the end of his staff.  The blow itself is sharp enough to knock her to the floor, but it’s not what sends the breath racing from her lungs.

 

It _burns._

 

Her heart pounds inside of her chest, too slow and too loud, and she can feel every beat with sudden, excruciating detail.  Fire spreads through her veins, twisting through her pulse from the knot of pain in the center of her chest.  She gasps, because she’s too shocked to scream.  An acrid, foul scent fills her nose, and in a rush, she goes fever-hot and bone-white all at once.  Her arms curl around herself, and she wonders if it hurt like this when her mom died.

 

She doesn’t hear the footsteps.  But she sees the boots when they come to a stop right in front of her nose.  She tries to struggle backwards.  Mandrake looms over her, staring down, his head cocked to one side.

 

“You should be nothing but bone by now,” he tells her.

 

A spasm rocks through her chest, and she clutches at her sweatshirt.  The fabric has gone black and stiff.  It crumbles against her skin when she presses too tightly, but she barely registers that behind the burning, ever-growing agony in her flesh.

 

“You’re no Leafman.  What are you?” Mandrake asks.  The butt of his staff moves towards her face.  It nudges her chin upwards, tilting her head back so that she’s forced to meet his eyes.  He looks confused.  MK’s not sure why the fact that she’s taking a long time to die is so fascinating to him – and she’s sure she’s dying anyway, nothing can hurt _this_ much and not be killing her – but some dim, distant part of her mind whispers that if he’s paying attention to her, then he’s ignoring the pod.

 

If she’s going to die, she’d rather not have it be for nothing.

 

“I’m… human…” she gasps out.

 

“A Hu-Man?” Mandrake asks.  “What the heck is a ‘hu’?”

 

“Not… from around here…” she says.  There are black spots creeping along the edges of her vision now.  She almost wants to let them take her.  At least then she could stop _hurting._   But if she does, she might never come back again.  Even if it would be nice to see Mom again, even if all she has is these last few moments she can scrape by with, she’s not ready to die.  Not yet.

 

“How are you resisting this?  You have no armour,” Mandrake says, emphasizing his point by jabbing at her shoulder, forcing her to turn and expose her wound for his perusal.  She’s kind of glad that she can’t see it.  If it’s as ugly as it feels, then she really doesn’t want to.  “You’re no queen.  What magic is it?  Who gave it to you?”

 

MK gasps in a breath.  It’s getting harder, now.  Her lungs feel too heavy.

 

“Tell me!” Mandrake demands, jabbing at her harder.

 

She cries out.

 

And then, suddenly, he’s gone.  There’s a brief flash of green, a scuffling of footsteps beside her head, and no more.  The sharp pressure on her shoulder is gone, and she curls into herself again, gasping and shuddering.  Behind the pain she can feel the sickness.  Creeping up her throat, sticking in the back of her head, leaving a sickly, bitter taste in her mouth.  Her vision is starting to blur, but she looks, anyway.  She sees Ronin, and the distant, detached voice in her head is surprised and glad that he’s alive.  Alive and fighting Mandrake, it seems, though he looks battered and exhausted and more than a little worse for wear.

 

She thinks she should help.  Then she almost laughs at herself, because what the heck is she gonna do?  Stagger to her feet and _bleed_ on them?

 

Except there’s no blood.  Not outside her skin, anyway.  There’s just the flesh of her chest, which is getting tighter and hotter and harder, and the beating of her heart, which is getting slower and slower.

 

Ronin goes down.  MK gasps, but it comes out all bubbling and wrong, and turns into coughing instead.

 

Mandrake says something she doesn’t quite catch, and then MK sees him, dropping through the open ceiling with a force of Leafmen behind him.  Nod.  For a moment, as Nod races to intercept Mandrake’s killing blow, as he saves Ronin, as the Leafmen close ranks around them, she thinks that they’ve won.  They must have.  But the sky is still dark overhead.  The pod is still locked in shadow.  Nod is fighting Mandrake, and Ronin looks towards her, and she feels herself convulse.  Shudder.  Her muscles spasm and she locks up, trying to grip herself to keep from thrashing against the hard stone floor.  She feels like she’s on fire, now.  Like she’s slipping through time as invisible flames eat her up, and for one instant, everything _slows._   Slow like her father had been, back at the house.  Like she used to be, by the Leafmen’s eyes.  Her heart beats once. 

 

Twice.

 

Three times.

 

In darkness, the pod blooms.

 

It takes her a moment to realize what’s happened.  Black tendrils of dust spiral throughout the chamber, chasing away the lingering starlight.  Mandrake lets loose a shout of triumph, even as the Leafmen outnumber and overpower him.

 

“ _No,_ ” someone whispers.  MK thinks it’s Ronin, maybe, but she can’t tell.  The black dust in the air and the black spots in her vision are melting together, wrapping around one another until she can’t tell them apart.  They swirl around her and rest against her, like cool vines wrapping around her arms.

 

 _Oh,_ she thinks, hazily.  _It’s not so bad._

 

Fingertips brush against her cheek, soothing in the shadows.  She thinks of her mom, and how she’d touch her forehead when she was sick, and hum softly to her until she fell asleep.  Someone gasps.

 

MK blinks, and turns her head, and it’s not her mom that she sees.  It’s the queen.  The queen’s ghost, barely visible in the shadows, lit by a halo of black dust.  MK wonders if she’s dead already, now.  But it still hurts too much.  It’s supposed to stop hurting once you’re actually dead, right?  It would just be cruel, otherwise.  The only good thing about death is that it stops people’s suffering.

 

“It’s alright,” Queen Tara says, gently.  “This really isn’t the way I was hoping things would go.  But it’ll be alright.”  She leans over, and brushes her lips gently across MK’s temple.  “Take care of them all.  For me.”

 

MK doesn’t have an answer.  She wants to ask how she’s supposed to take care of anyone when she’s dying herself, but the words won’t come out.  The queen’s ghost turns, and stares towards the blurry mass of green that MK’s pretty sure is Ronin.  Everything has gone still, she realizes.  The fighting’s stopped.  Even from outside, the noises of bats and birds seem to have quieted down.

 

“Come on, don’t look so dour,” the queen says.  “One last smile?  For me?”

 

He must grant her request, because after a second, she smiles, too.  A little sadly, but truly.

 

“There it is,” she whispers.  Then there’s a sigh, like a gentle gust of wind.  The darkness closes in, but it isn’t anything like what MK expects.  For one stray moment, she feels like she’s herself, and she’s Queen Tara, too, kneeling beside her.  She sees the possibilities stretch out before her.  The might-have-been’s and the what-if’s.  She sees Tara as she would have been if she’d lived to pass on her power properly.  She feels it in her bones, how the queen waited, after she was chosen, until she could put it aside again.  Until she could be just another Leafman again, free to have her own life back.  She sees the pod bloom in moonlight, beautiful and bright, and watches as the power swirls around a little flower girl.  Turns her petals white, like the soft flow of the queen’s skirts.  She sees the same girl standing next to Tara’s glittering ghost.  What would have happened, if the pod had bloomed in moonlight anyway, even after everything.  She sees the new queen send her home in a gust of wind, sees a goodbye kiss, smells the sweet scents on the air.

 

She sees those possibilities slip away into the inky blackness, and feels regret as they go.  Regret for the free life that Tara will never have.  Regret for the destiny that the little flower girl will never know.

 

When she’d first held the pod, MK had felt like it was hers, and wasn’t hers at the same time.  _Schrodinger’s lotus_ , she realizes.  If it bloomed in moonlight, she sees clearly, it would have chosen someone else.  If it bloomed in darkness, though… _that_ was why Tara had chosen her.  To be there, if the worst should come to pass.  Until it had bloomed, it could have gone either way, and so the pod had always been hers and not-hers, a not-yet and what-if and maybe, a possibility that had as much validity as any other until the deed was done.

 

Humans are not, by their base nature, creatures of light.

 

But that’s okay, MK realizes, in a sudden rush of understanding.  It’s not about one-or-the-other.  Not really.  It’s about balance.

 

The darkness closes in and wraps around her, and where it goes, it washes the pain away.  It soothes the fire and sinks down into her skin, like a bath of cool water.  She lets out a breath as the agony leaves her, at last, and she feels her heartbeat even out.  Something soft drapes around her.  She opens her eyes.  It’s dark, still.  Pitch black almost.  But she can see just fine anyway, as if some helpful ghost has gone around and highlighted everything in gentle hues of silver and blue.  She can see where Ronin is still slumped against the floor.  Where the Nod is standing, sword in hand, blinking in the darkness.  Where the other Leafmen and Mandrake stand in the middle of their abandoned skirmish, doing much the same thing.

 

“What’s going on?” Nim asks, picking himself up in a far corner of the chamber.  “I can’t see anything!”

 

Mandrake’s eyes are better in the darkness.  MK can tell by the way he stares at her as she rises slowly to her feet.  There’s no pain anymore at all, now.  Just a slight stiffness in her chest.  She raises a hand to it, and something dark clings to her wrist.  Sleeves of smooth, black scales have replaced the battered material of her hoodie.  There’s something stiff around her neck; a collar of dark fur, that smells like the night air after a storm.  She is covered in pliant, form-fitting armour.  The skin of her palms is as pale as always, but greyer.  She presses her palm to her chest, and feels the telltale remnants of near-death beneath her fingertips.

 

She can feel it _everywhere,_ in fact.  In the air outside.  In the dark rivulets of petrified wood that Mandrake put into the ground.  It coils up his staff, and lingers in hints and impressions in Ronin’s injuries.

 

She should be frightened.  Instead, a strange sort of calm settles in.

 

 _“You?”_ Mandrake demands.  In the darkness he thunders past the Leafmen, who seem too shocked and blinded, still, to react.  He marches up towards her.  “How could it possibly be _you?!”_

 

MK feels the death and decay lingering in his bat-fur cloak.  Without really thinking about it, she waves her hand, and the dead fur ripples.  It seizes around Mandrake’s body, tripping him up and clinging to him until he is dragged, flailing and cursing, to the floor.  She takes in a deep breath, and realizes that the darkness is her doing; it’s coming from her, rippling outwards from the black scales of her armour, sinking away from the suddenly-kind-of-distinctly-blood-red strands of her hair.  She pulls it back in.  It’s surprisingly easy to do.  The sparse grey tendrils of starlight are freed, and she knows at once when the Leafmen can see again.

 

Nod takes a step backward, as if someone just slapped him.

 

“What _are_ you!?” Mandrake demands again, from his place on the floor.

 

“Be quiet, you slimeball,” she snaps.  Then she marches forward and kicks him sharply in the ribs.  _“That’s_ for hitting me with your stupid staff!  Do you have any idea how much that hurt?”

 

Mandrake grunts, and then blinks up at her as if she is a puzzle that he can’t quite figure out.  She figures that after everything he’s done, she might as well just leave him to stew in his own confusion for a while.  When she looks back up again, the Leafman are watching her warily.  Nod is still gaping.  So is Ronin, it seems.  But some of the others are eyeing her warily, now, their weapons leveled in her general direction.  She winces.

 

“MK?” Nod ventures, tentatively, his wide eyes fixed on her.  “What’s going on?”

 

“I, um… I…” she stammers.  The certainty of it is written all over the back of her mind, but she can’t quite seem to find the right words for it.  Her throat feels dry, suddenly.  The blackened remnants of the pod’s petals drift sadly in the altar behind him.  She can feel them there, like tiny prickles on the back of her neck, but coming from the inside.  She licks her lips, and tries again.

 

“It’s all about balance.  When the pod blooms in moonlight, it picks a successor from one of the, you know, the… light folk?  I don’t know the proper names for this stuff,” she admits.  “But when it blooms in darkness, it picks someone from the, the other side of the equation, right?  Normally that would be a boggan, but… _that_ was why Queen Tara changed me.  She was afraid.  She knew that this might happen, and if it did, she – she needed someone who _wasn’t_ a boggan, someone who didn’t follow Mandrake.  Someone else she could give the power to.”

 

“So…” Nod begins.  “So what, you’re the queen now?”

 

MK smiles, awkward and sad.

 

“I’m _a_ queen,” she says.

 

With a grunt, Ronin staggers tiredly to his feet.

 

“Put your weapons down,” he orders.  Nod seems to realize for the first time, then, that his fellows have their swords aimed in a distinctly MK-themed direction.  She’s a little bit heartened by the way he scowls at them.  But it’s Ronin who strides forward, and it’s Ronin who comes to a stop in front of her, and gives her a look over, and then nods, once, to himself.

 

“You hurt?” he asks.

 

“Not anymore,” she replies.  He nods again.

 

“Well,” he says.  “I guess we’ll make do.”  Then he grimaces, and eases his way awkwardly down onto one knee.  It takes MK a minute to figure out what he’s even trying do.

 

“Whoa, no, don’t kneel!” she says, waving her arms out in front of her.  It’s probably just her imagination that has one corner of his mouth twitching upwards.  There’s no reason for him to smile at that, after all.  “Nobody, no kneeling, none!  No!  Get back up, you look like you’ve just been through the wringer anyway.”  When he stays down, she lets out a huff of frustration and turns.  “Nod, make him stop!” she beseeches.  “This is so awkward.”

 

Nod snorts, and glances sideways towards Ronin.  A moment passes.

 

Then, to her absolutely mortification, he drops to one knee, too.

 

“No!” she groans.  “Oh, not you too!  Get up!”

 

“Hey, you said it yourself, you’re a queen now.  I don’t want to be accused of having bad manners,” Nod replies.  He’s smiling.  It’s a little strained, but it’s definitely there.  “Your Majesty.”

 

“This is not funny,” she tells him.

 

From the floor nearby, Mandrake lets out an anguished moan.

 

“Where did I go wrong _?_ ” he demands of the universe in general.

 

“I blame you for this,” MK viciously assures him.


	2. Shadows

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which everything sucks.

 

 

A hundred years.  That’s how long a queen reigns for.

 

 

MK’s not even sure that’s how long she can feasibly _live_ for.

 

She wishes that she could just go and find another pod and that little girl in Tara’s – memories?  Dreams?  Visions?  Whichever – and just pass the title along as soon as the next full moon happens by.  But she _knows_ it doesn’t work like that.

 

She _knows_ a lot of things now.  It’s kind of weird, but, she’s not really complaining about that part.  It’s nice to have some certainty for a change.

 

The light folk, the People of the Growth – she still doesn’t know what the proper name for the distinction is – look at her with wariness, and hesitance. 

 

The boggans are another matter.  Mandrake can’t be allowed to return to them, for obvious reasons.  But MK doesn’t quite have the stomach to order an execution, either.  She lets the Leafmen imprison him as Ronin sees fit, in the end, and approaches the remaining boggan horde with a sure step.  Nod follows uncertainly at her side, radiating tension.

 

The boggans see her and recognize something in her.  Thankfully, they don’t bow.  But they stand down, and stare at Nod suspiciously, and when he moves too close, they growl.

 

“Go home,” MK says, trying her best to channel every ounce of queenly authority she’s inherited.  “It’s over now.  Your, uh, territory will be larger than it was, because you sort of won, I guess.  But Mandrake’s plans were really dumb.  If everything is a constant wasteland of rot, then nothing new will grow, and if nothing new grows, then even boggans will starve. That’s just stupid no matter how you slice it.”

 

As speeches go, it’s not terribly inspiring.  But it’s not meant to be.  It’s meant to make them leave. And by the time the first rays of sunlight begin peeking out over the horizon, the last bat has vanished from the sky, and leaving only a peaceful blue expanse behind.

 

In the early glow of dawn, the changes done to her are undeniable.  Inside and out.  The sunlight seems harsher than it did before.  Just a little too sharp, a little too blinding.  She finds a fur-lined hood at the back of her new outfit, and pulls it up over her head.  She swallows down the thick taste of her own unease.  She thinks that if she was still permitted the luxury of self-denial, she’d be going through it very acutely at this moment.

 

“I guess I look really different, huh?” she asks Nod.

 

“Pfft, nah,” Nod says, his lips curving into a grin that doesn’t quite reach his eyes.  “Maybe a little, uh, paler.  I think it’s the outfit, really.  Washes you out.”

 

“Suuuure, right.  The outfit,” MK agrees.  She pretends to let it go.  But when they head back inside, she walks towards over to the altar, and stares at her reflection in the water.  Waxy grey skin.  Blood red hair.  Deep shadows beneath her eyes.

 

She looks absolutely ghoulish.

 

After that, she can’t really stop herself from staring, any time she passes by a reflective surface.  It’s her but not her.  Almost like she’s wearing the best Halloween costume of her life, but even so, she doesn’t _wear_ it like a costume.  She wears it like it’s the same skin she’s always had.

 

Ronin catches her at it by surprise.  Or almost-by-surprise.  She can feel him by the lingering tendrils of near-death that still cling to him, on top of another sense.  It’s one she’s only just starting to put together; a glittering brightness, a clean, untouchable energy that’s tied to almost everyone around.  The base element of his nature.  It feels very youthful, even though Ronin himself does not.  Sometimes it itches unpleasantly at the back of her teeth when it gets too strong.

 

“Tara stared at her reflection a lot, too, after she first transformed.  She was even younger than you back then.  Just a girl, really,” he tells her.

 

“I’m sorry you didn’t get a longer goodbye,” she says, tearing her gaze away from herself.

 

Ronin shakes his head.

 

“I got one.  That’s more than many can say,” he tells her.  Then he turns a little, and gestures back the way he came.  “Come on.  We need to talk.”

 

“I thought we _were_ talking,” she grumbles a little, but nevertheless follows him.

 

There are councils.  Moonhaven is a city, and the forest is a nation, and she’s not really sure why she’s just a little bit surprised to find out that they have a formal government structure just like anyone else.  It’s not really part of the ‘natural order’ in the way that the queen’s role is, although it’s not disparate from it, either.  But that means it isn’t something that she intrinsically _knows_ , even though some of the council members seem to think that she should.  The council members are elected and chosen by old traditions and customs.  Ronin tells her, in a low whisper, that they don’t often congregate all together.  These are special circumstances.

 

 _Yeah, no kidding,_ MK thinks.

 

Traditionally, a new queen would be expected to heal the damage done by Mandrake and his army of goons.  To step up and take the throne, and advise the people on how to follow the laws of the earth, and preserve the balance.  MK’s powers aren’t really of the ‘healing and restoring’ variety, however.  She can _feel_ that things have been thrown off-balance, and she has some vague idea of how to fix it, but no one wants to listen to her anyway.  They’re too busy shouting over one another and shooting her suspicious, disquieted looks to bother asking for advice.  In the huge, sun-filled chamber where they meet, the pure-bright sense itches at the back of her teeth, and before long the light is making her eyes ache, and her temples start to throb.

 

“The meadow is still little more than a wasteland!” one dandelion-styled councillor proclaims, seeds billowing around him as he waves an arm through the air.  “And this new so-called _queen_ promised the boggans more territory!  After all they’ve done, do we really intend to _reward_ them?  Are we going to give up land that has been healthy and flourishing for generations, just so they can spread their rot and decay all across it?”

 

“Does she even have the authority to make such promises?” another, petal-headed councillor asks, peering suspiciously towards her.  “Are we looking at _our_ new queen, or some boggan matriarch?”

 

MK bristles.

 

“I’m _not_ a boggan,” she says.

 

“Then what are you?” a third councillor demands, leaning forward in his seat with an intense curiosity that is somehow less offensive than the others.  He looks to be the oldest one present, and his brown, twig-like face is lined with dozens of tiny cracks and crags.

 

“I’m a… I was, a human,” she says.  “What you’d call a stomper.  The queen shrank me.”  She lifts her head a little, setting her shoulders back, staring steadily in defiance of the oppressive brightness around her.  “And now I am a queen.  A dark queen.”

 

The councillor nods.

 

“And do you mean us harm, Dark Queen?”  His gaze flits briefly over to her side, where Ronin has been standing the entire time, radiating tension and disapproval.  “The Leafmen certainly seem to think not.”

 

MK shakes her head.

 

“I don’t mean anyone any harm at all,” she says.  “I didn’t ask for or expect any of this.  Like all of you, I’m just trying to make the best of a really, _really_ weird situation.”

 

One of the other councillors leans forward.

 

“And we’re supposed to take your word for that?” she asks.

 

MK looks her in the eye.  The yellow petals around her neck flutter backwards a bit.

 

“I told the boggans to leave.  If I’d told them to stay and tear everything apart, I’m pretty sure they would have done _that_ , instead.  So yeah, I think I’ve earned a little benefit of the doubt,” she replies.

 

That starts another uproar, of course, but MK can’t really bring herself to regret saying it.  The headache behind her eyes is growing, and she’s starting to feel too hot, too uncomfortable, too exposed, and too overwhelmed by everything to bother with even a hint of patience.  When it becomes apparent that the council has no intention of calming down any time soon, she turns on her heel, and heads back out the way that they came in.

 

Ronin hesitates for half a second, and then follows her.

 

Almost as soon as she steps through the archway and into the dimmer light, some of the discomfort eases away.  She lets out a breath, and presses her hand to a nearby wall, sagging slightly.

 

“This _sucks,_ ” she says, with feeling.

 

“I’m sorry,” Ronin says.  “I expected better wisdom from them.  More discipline, surely.”  He throws an irritated look back towards the council chamber.

 

“I get that they’re confused,” she says.  Before he’d left to go scour through his archives again, Nim had told her that the last time there had been a Dark monarch was so long ago that none of the scrolls he’d read had ever mentioned one.  Not even in passing.  She can feel the truth of that, but she also _knows_ that she’s not the first.  There are… echoes, sort of, that stretch behind her.  She can feel Tara there, and the queen who came before her; but they’re distant.  Almost like they’re on the other side of a glass wall.  Deep down past them, on her own side of the wall, there are more.  White bones at the bottom of a long pit.  Melodic whispers drifting up from the shadows of an old well.

 

“But I can’t change this _,_ Ronin!” she exclaims, gesturing towards herself.  “Believe me, if I could, I would.  I can’t – I can’t _go home_ now.”  She can’t make herself grow.  That’s a power that rests with Growth, naturally – a power on the other side of the magical coin, so to speak.  Her face feels hot and too-heavy, and she realizes with a start that there are wet tracks trailing down her cheeks.  Ronin looks like a deer caught in headlights as she tries to brush the tears away, embarrassment creeping into the giant heap of negative emotions all mixing together inside of her.

 

Ronin clears his throat.  His reaches out a gloved hand, and pats her awkwardly on the shoulder.

 

“There, now, it’s not as bad as all that,” he says.  “I could go back in and try to bash some sense into those thick skulls, if you like.”

 

Since her mother’s death, she can count on one hand the number of people who have actually tried to comfort her, and not just offered up some condescending platitudes or avoided the topic altogether.  Her heart clenches, and before she can think the better of it, she finds herself crashing against Ronin’s chest.  His armour is smooth and warm where she presses her face against it.  On his back, there’s a long, aching bruise that she can feel, just beneath her fingers.  She’s careful not to press down on it.

 

“I’m sorry,” she says.  “I’m sorry, I know that this is really awkward and we haven’t known each other for very long and you’re probably not a hugger, but I just-”

 

Ronin quiets her with a sigh.  One of his hands comes to rest hesitantly at the top of her head, the other on the back of her shoulder.

 

“It’s alright,” he tells her. “You just hang on for however long you need to, and then we’ll never speak of this again.”

 

A surprised giggle escapes her, squeezing out past the tears and helping to chase them away.

 

As far as Big Meltdowns go, it’s pretty anticlimactic.  Not much to write home about.  She’s never been a huge fan of whirlwind fits or massive, melodramatic freak-outs anyway.

 

She doesn’t sleep that night, though.  A little daffodil boy with leaf green hands is sent to awkwardly assign her a room.  A nice room – not the Royal Chambers, but those are bright and airy and green and not really suited for her, anyway.  Instead they give her something deep down inside, not far from the Leafmen barracks, but underground, and far away from where Mandrake’s being held.  She ignores some of the more suspiciously dungeon-like qualities of the place in exchange for appreciating the cool stone and long shadows, and the _quiet._   Her room is far from the trembling life of new green shoots, the buzzing-itch of Bright Things.  She peels off her new clothes, and takes full stock of them, and of herself.

 

There’s a fine, supple quality to the material of her new outfit.  It’s pliant where it needs to be, firm elsewhere, and obviously made to fit her.  It comes off relatively easily, and she knows that with a wave of her hand it’ll be back in place like it never left.  There doesn’t seem to be any sign of her old clothes.  In contrast, her body hasn’t changed much.  The ashen shift in her skin tone is universal, and her freckles have turned into little black specks instead of brown ones, but otherwise, the only big difference is her new scar.

 

It’s a hard, white mark, roughly the size of her palm; a spray of ugly jagged lines that seem to sink in a little bit, and get puckered towards the edges.  She traces the outline with her fingers, and knows that, queen or not, she’s going to have it forever.  The certainty leaves her feeling cold.  It is a seriously ugly scar, not like a Hollywood scar where the skin just looks a little bit different, but a full-blown, gigantic, uneven mark, right there on her chest.

 

Just the same, she’d still rather be alive with it than, y’know, dead with a rotting chest wound.

 

 _Stay positive,_ she tells herself, and roots around in a couple of the room’s drawers until she finds an old shirt that’s long enough to sleep in.

 

Then she climbs into the bed, and lies there.

 

And lies there.

 

It’s kind of weird.  She feels tired – physically tired, mentally tired, emotionally tired.  But as she lies there, even though her brain won’t shut off and help with the last two problems, her exhaustion starts to ebb away.  A pleasant prickling starts to creep up her spine.  She can’t see it, but she knows that outside, the sun has set.  The dark blanket of night rests itself over the world, and she feels infinitely better for it.

 

“Oh,” she says softly.  She knows what’s going on.  She knows that if Queen Tara had still been alive, then she would have felt like this at first dawn’s light.  A vivid _awareness_ of the world around her settles in, and unconsciously, she deepens the shadows in her room.  She breathes in, and breathes out, and feels more like she’s waking up than going to sleep.

 

There’s no chance of sleeping now.  Not even a little bit, no matter how much she wants to rest.  She lets out a sigh and climbs back out of bed, strips off the nightshirt and waves her hand, and she’s dressed again.

 

The door to her room creaks when she pushes it open.  The hallway beyond it is empty and still.  After only a moment’s hesitation, she walks out, and begins a quiet exploration.  The shadows ripple and curl around her.  A couple of times she has to stop and concentrate on reining them in, when they render the way completely pitch black by accident.  Long halls of stone and earth rise around her, sinking down and stretching upwards, winding their way into tall chambers and tapering off towards small, arched doorways.

 

Day or night, Moonhaven is beautiful.

 

She wanders, but never really gets lost.  She knows this place, even though she doesn’t.  Countless queens have walked these halls, and while she couldn’t give specific directions or draw a map of it, the layout makes _sense_ in a sort of intuitive way.  The rooms she passes are all still and silent.  She can feel the hum of living energy, and, more acutely, the pull of the decay.  Her feet end up taking her towards quiet rooms where injured Leafmen are sleeping, recovering.  She can feel the poison in them.  She knows that if she reaches out, and pushes it, she could make it consume them whole.  The thought of it puts a heavy stone of dread in her gut.

 

She’s not a monster.  She _knows_ she’s not a monster.  Everything living is dying at the same time.  It’s all relative.  If a different queen made a plant grow faster, she would be killing it faster, too, quickening its life for the sake of its growth.  Because as surely as things grow, they decay.

 

MK’s kind of glad that she got this little tidbit of understanding with her transformation, because otherwise she’s pretty sure she’d be freaking out a _lot_ more.

 

She slips into the sick rooms, and lets the darkness grow and grow around the sleeping Leafmen, until the silvery sheen falls across her vision and she knows the room is pitch black.  The power underneath her skin is rippling, itching to act, pulling her in twenty-two different directions at once now that night has fallen, now that it’s properly woken up.  There’s nothing she can do about the bruises or gashes or broken bones.  But those don’t call to her the most strongly anyway.  Her attention is drawn, instead, towards the bright, blighted patches of flesh where infection festers, where the touch of rot spreads. The wounds that poisoned blades and arrows have cut.

 

Her chest twinges sympathetically.  But the rot doesn’t really seem as horrifying as it ordinarily would to her, not anymore.  In every infection, tiny little microorganisms thrive.  In every death, there’s the chance for new life, too.

 

Gently, she places her hand over the worst wounds, and coaxes the rot back.  It’s reluctant.  There’s so much for it to devour, such ripe picking grounds for decay.  She can’t overwhelm it as another queen might, or chase it back with a never-ending stream of new growth, until it has spent itself and consumed nothing vital in the process.  Instead she has to _pull_ , cajoling it away, bringing it towards her instead.  It pools onto the floor in tiny puddles that join together, and follow after her like a lost puppy.

 

A rotten, fetid puddle puppy.

 

MK has _no idea_ what to do with it when she’s done.  It needs to go _somewhere,_ obviously, but wherever it goes is going to end up rotting, unless she maybe puts it someplace with nothing that can rot, like a metal cage or something.  There doesn’t seem to be any of those handy, oddly enough.

 

It trails along behind her when she leaves the sick rooms.  She wanders for a while, nervously aware of how freaked out somebody might get if they happened upon her just then, skulking around in the shadows with a pile of animated, flesh-eating ooze following behind her.  It’s not as if anyone could fail to notice.  The smell alone would probably do the trick.

 

“This is so messed up,” she whispers to herself.  She’s a little worried that it’s stopped occurring to her, frequently, that this is all _very_ messed up.

 

Her wandering feet find their way to a garden.  There are a lot of gardens in Moonhaven.  Inside, outside.  There are a lot of places where plants seem to just be randomly growing, too; roots tangling over stone and sinking down, down, towards the cool, distant earth.

 

She’s a little bit worried about that, actually.  It can’t possibly be stable.

 

She follows a passageway until it lets out into a moonlit terrace, covered in huge, round-petal flowers, and smiles at the feel of the night air against her skin.  It washes over her in a rush, and before she’s even thought about it, the puddle at her heels has slunk forward and seeped into the earth.  The roots of the nearest flowers harden and turn black.  The stems wither, and the petals shrink and curl in on themselves, before breaking off and shuddering down towards the soil.

 

MK’s eyes widen.

 

“Oops,” she whispers.

 

“You got something against flowers now?” a familiar voice asks.  MK flinches, and then looks up, and there, on a terrace above her, is Nod.  He’s sitting there, his legs dangling down over the side.  Watching her.

 

“No,” she says.  “Nope, nothing against flowers.”

 

“Just those ones in particular, then?” he wonders, and hops down.

 

There’s a panicky voice in the back of her head that _still_ thinks he’s going to break his neck doing that, even though she knows he won’t.  He lands easily, his booted feet crunching where they hit the withered stalks and dead petals.  There’s a tidy little circle of death all around them.

 

“There was – I – and then – with the, well, the… it was an accident,” she settles on, feeling uncomfortably aware of the tension in his shoulders, and the way he doesn’t quite meet her eye.

 

“Some accident,” he says.  “Be careful you don’t _accidentally_ do that to any people.  That would be a mess.”

 

She flinches, and he winces, and a hot, angry spark of pain jumps in her chest.  She folds her arms around herself and looks away.

 

“I _won’t_ ,” she insists.  “I _wouldn’t._ ”

 

“Well, not on purpose, but I mean…” Nod gestures pointedly to the dead flowers around them.

 

She feels like she’s been slapped.  Her jaw clenches.

 

“You – you don’t know _anything!_   Don’t you dare talk to me like you know the first thing about being responsible!” she snaps at him.  She can feel the places where he’s hurt.  Not badly, but the bruises and scrapes from the fight, lingering underneath his clothes.  She can feel the distant plant-death of the fabric he’s wearing, the mouse leather in his belt and boots, all layered over the summer-bright center of him.  She couldn’t hold him the way she held Mandrake, but she could probably make him trip.  She really wants to try.  Something of it must show in her eyes, because Nod’s widen, and he takes a step back from her.

 

Just like that, the wind goes out of her sails.  She deflates, and pushes past the dead blossoms towards the edge of the terrace.

 

“MK, wait,” Nod calls.  “Wait.  I’m sorry, okay?”

 

She stops.  Stares down at the long drop to the ground, the plants gathered around in enormous repose, like the landscape on some alien planet.  The darkness humming in her skin.

 

“I want to go home,” she says, quietly, more to herself than to Nod.  It’s a feeling that she’s had for a long time. Since well before she was shrunk, really.  Before she went to see her dad.  Back when home was a cheerful little apartment in the city, where her biggest worries were passing her tests and getting a part-time job to help pay for college.  She wants to wake up to find that the last year has all been a dream, and that she’s back in her own bed, in her own room, listening to her mom humming while she makes Sunday morning breakfast.  More than anything, _that’s_ what she wants.

 

Nod walks up until he’s standing right beside her.  She hunches her shoulders, and resists the urge to look at him.

 

“I know,” he says.  “I don’t really get what’s happening, here, but… I know it’s not fair.”

 

MK shrugs.

 

“Life’s not fair,” she says.  “My mom left my dad because everyone thought he was crazy, and it turns out, he was right all along.  I walked out of his door because I couldn’t handle being second place to a delusion, and now I’m living right in the middle of it.  This forest needs a queen that can repair it, and instead it’s got _this_ ,” she gestures vaguely towards herself and the dead flowers behind them.  “Your dad, my mom, Queen Tara, all of them and plenty of other people besides, they deserved to live.  But they’re gone.”

 

“Yeah.  Yeah, I know,” Nod agrees.

 

“So what’s one more unfairness?” she wonders.

 

“Look.  Just because bad things happen, that doesn’t mean we should just lay back and take it,” Nod says.  “If you want to go home, then we’ll find a way to get you home.  I mean it probably won’t be easy or anything, but just because it seems really, really unlikely, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible, right?  There has to be a way.  Maybe there’s another way of making a new queen, and it’s just that nobody’s bothered to try before.  Maybe there’s something in some scroll that Nim hasn’t read yet.  Maybe we can just, like, turn it off, or switch it to Good Queen mode at least, or – or could you just _look at me_ , please?  For starters?”

 

His hand hovers next to her shoulder, not quite touching.  MK stares at him, and then lets out a gusty breath and looks at his face.  She searches his expression, although for what, she’s not really sure.

 

“It’s not really ‘bad queen’ mode,” she tells him.  “It’s an elemental shift to the diametrically opposed magical alignment of decay versus growth that resulted when the queen’s magic was forced to rejuvenate under the defining influence of darkness rather than light, which meant that the power needed to fixate on a target that was complimentary on a baseline level to its new alignment in order to manifest properly and avoid dissipating into the universe at large.”

 

Nod blinks.

 

“Oh,” he says.  “…Okay.  But that’s kind of a mouthful.”

 

She smiles thinly.

 

“Mostly I’ve just been going with ‘dark’ and ‘light’.  I think I’d prefer not to be called ‘bad’.”

 

“I guess that makes sense,” he agrees.  Then he settles back a little, withdrawing his hand and scratching awkwardly at the side of his head with it.  “So… what’s it like?  You seem really different now.”

 

Her heart sinks.

 

“Do I?” she asks.

 

“Um, well,” Nod replies, shrugging helplessly.  “You’re kind of grey-ish.  And… really confident?  I mean, you just walked right up to those boggans like you _knew_ they weren’t going to try anything.”

 

MK shrugs back at him.

 

“That’s because I did know that they weren’t going to try anything,” she tells him.  “It’s kind of hard to explain.  I just sort of know things, now, that I didn’t know before.”

 

“Do you hear voices?”  he asks, almost eagerly.  “There was this one old guy who used to live next door when I was little, and he heard voices.  Sometimes he had whole conversations with them.  It was pretty awesome.  Well, until he went kind of crazy and tried to swallow a whole maple leaf and they took him away, at least.”

 

“That’s not really comforting.”

 

“Right, right, sorry.  But do you?  Hear voices?” he presses.

 

She makes a so-so gesture with her hand.

 

“It’s hard to describe.  I guess it’s like… you know how when you’re reading a book, and there’s a voice that’s reading the words in your head, and it’s your voice, but sometimes it’s like your voice with an impression of different characters who are talking, and sometimes it’s not really a _voice_ but just a picture of everything the voice is describing, because the words just kind of run together and make this image or this feeling and you _know_ what it means even though you haven’t really lived it or seen anything like it for yourself?” she tries.

 

Nod stares at her awkwardly.

 

“What’s a book?” he asks.

 

MK huffs.

 

“It’s like a bunch of scrolls all bound together to tell a story,” she says.  “You guys don’t have _books?”_

 

“Nope,” Nod replies.

 

“Well that’s just great,” she grumbles. 

 

“I’m just going to go with the idea that you hear voices,” he tells her.

 

“I am not a crazy person!” she insists.  “Would you stop comparing me to one?  This is serious!”

 

“Craziness is also pretty serious.  Just putting that out there.”

 

“Argh!”

 

MK does not stamp her foot, because she isn’t twelve and Nod isn’t Tyson Moore who used to sit behind her in class and throw pencil shavings into her hair, but it’s a close thing.  Talk of insanity evokes uncomfortable images of her father, racing around his house, grabbing her into a hug and running from monitor to monitor, and how she’d thought that he was barely clinging to the edge of sanity, how sad she’d felt that even after everything, he was still more focused on his imaginary little people than on her.  Everyone called him crazy, but he was just seeing something that they couldn’t.

 

The similarity makes her shudder.

 

“Um,” Nod says.  “Is it getting darker, or am I going blind?”

 

MK waves a hand, and the shadows shrink back to their normal sizes.

 

“Sorry,” she says.  “I’m still getting the hang of that.”

 

Nod glances back at the flowers, for what feels like the millionth time, and MK is getting kind of sick of looking at them by this point.  It’s making her feel all kinds of guilty, and, really, they are _just_ flowers.  Flowers die all the freaking time, whether by nature or inclement weather or little kids yanking them out of the ground to give to their mothers, or, in this case, a little bit of misplaced magic.  Better it be the flowers than the injured Leafmen, right?

 

“Okay, don’t freak out and don’t take this the wrong way,” Nod says.  “But you _really_ need to be careful.  If everybody decides that you’re too big of a danger, they might try and lock you up or something.”

 

“I _told_ you, I won’t – wait, what?”  MK comes up short.  Nod’s not meeting her eyes again, instead looking at a point that’s somewhere vaguely over her shoulder.

 

“I overheard some people talking.  A couple of the councillors, mostly,” he tells her.

 

“They wanna lock me up?” she asks, and now it occurs to her that the uncomfortably dungeon-esque qualities of her room may have been more than just an unfortunate side-effect of being underground.

 

“Not everyone!” Nod assures her.  “Just some of them, and Ronin’ll do everything he can to stop them from trying it, but, well… people are freaked out.  You gotta understand.  You saw what the boggans did.  This isn’t about, like, ‘oh the night is as beautiful as the day in its own special way’.  You said it yourself.  The boggans _won_ that fight.  And now it looks like you’re their queen, and we’ve still lost ours.  All the damage that’s been done is still there.  If we didn’t have Mandrake locked up, I’m pretty sure people would still be panicking.”

 

“But _I_ haven’t done anything bad!” she insists.  “I don’t get it.  I sent the boggans home.  I trapped Mandrake with his own stupid clothes!  I know everybody’s upset that it’s not as easy as just having me wave my hands and regrow the whole forest, but that’s not _my_ fault!”

 

Nod shrugs.

 

“There’s no such thing as a friendly boggan,” he tells her.  “And as far as some people are concerned, you’re looking pretty boggan-ish.”

 

“I’m not a boggan!” she exclaims, for what feels like the hundredth time.

  
“I didn’t say you were!” he insists.  “I’m just trying to explain the situation, because obviously you don’t get it, because you’re not from here, and the voices in your head apparently haven’t bothered to explain this stuff!”

 

“I don’t have _voices in my head!”_ she argues.  “Why are you not getting this?”

 

“Why aren’t _you_ getting this?  I’m just trying to help!”

 

“Well so was I, and look where it got me!” she snaps.

 

Nod stares at her, helplessly, and she feels like a heel for yelling and also like she should start up again just on principal.  She feels like she does whenever she fights with her father, like they’re both on two completely different wavelengths and no matter how hard they keep trying to meet in the middle, they just keep barely missing each other instead.  It’s frustrating, because when they’d been on that deer, she’d felt, for the first time in a long time, like she was finally talking to someone who _got it._   But now her programming’s been reset, and his hasn’t, and she’s back to being alone again.  A leaf on the wind.

 

It shouldn’t hurt so much.  She barely knows him, after all.

 

“I can’t do this,” she whispers.  Maybe that moment outside the council chambers wasn’t her big meltdown after all.  “I’m sorry, but I can’t, I just _can’t…”_

 

“MK?”  Nod takes a tentative step forward.  Again, his hand reaches for her, but doesn’t quite touch her.

 

He was never shy about touching her before.

 

She swallows the lump in her throat, the hard rock that feels like it’s wedged itself in there, and takes a step backwards.  And another.  She lets the shadows grow long again, and shakes her head, tearing her gaze away from the distressed look on his face.

 

“I’m sorry,” she repeats.

 

The shadows flood over them, and she turns, and jumps down from the terrace.  It’s a good landing.  She comes down on the balls of her feet, the treads of her new boots clinging where her sneakers might have slipped.  Nod calls after her.

 

She flees.


	3. Kindred

 

 

It’s safe to say that MK doesn’t really have a specific destination in mind when she takes off.

 

It feels good, though.  She runs further and faster than she ever has before – well maybe not _technically_ further, but that’s not the point.  She jumps and lands and stumbles a lot, but it’s hard to mind that when she’s got her strange new nighttime alertness pumping through her system, and fresh air on her cheeks, driving back her thoughts and fears and worries.  She loses herself in the strange new senses she has, in the empty beetle carcasses and deep-dug burrows beneath her boots, in the fallen tree stumps, rotting away into the earth even as mossy new growth climbs over them.  A bat flies by overhead, at one point, and she feels him.  Not like how she feels the dead or rotting things, but with a certain _resonance_ that the flitting little hummingbirds and bright, steady Leafmen had lacked.  It’s only a hint of it, but it gives her pause.

 

She kind of wants to feel it again.  That connection.  She thinks she felt it before, with the boggans, but there was so much going on and so many different, new senses coming at her all at once, she hadn’t really had time to focus on it.  So she concentrates.  She stands in the darkness beneath a broad, old oak tree, and closes her eyes, and just _listens_ to her feelings.

 

When she feels it her eyes fly open, and she lets out a breath, and the forest heights all around her are traced in rivers of silver and blue.  It’s so beautiful that for a few seconds, all she can do is stare.

 

After a while her feet start to move of their own accord, heading towards the strange thread of connection she can feel.  It’s pretty strong.  She’s not sure if that’s because it’s more in tune with her than the bright stuff is, or what, but she’s not complaining.  She isn’t really going towards it in hopes of making _friends_.  She just wants to feel it a bit better.  Maybe go and have a closer look at the kinds of things that have only tried to kill her up until now.

 

Underneath of all of her new feelings, there’s this weird, off-kilter sense that she knows comes from Imbalance.  There seems to be a lot of it, all pushing at her from different directions.  She ignores it, for now.  She isn’t _exactly_ sure what she’s supposed to do about it, although she thinks that maybe she’ll ‘know’ when she gets there.  If she gets there.

 

It occurs to her, suddenly, that she’s currently traipsing through the underbrush, alone and unprotected, with nothing but the clothes on her back and her weird new superpowers to help her.  And she’s not even a little bit afraid.

 

 

Some things scurry away from her in the dark.  It makes her uncomfortable to know that she’s being avoided – but then again, it’s probably for the best.  After a couple minutes the feeling goes _upward_ , and she exchanges walking for climbing and jumping.  A moth flutters by, landing briefly on the rough wood near her head, and it feels bright inside.  She gives in to temptation and brushes a gentle, meaningless touch against the soft fur of its back, before it flutters its dusty wings and takes off again.  She smiles a little before she continues her climb, and finds them.

 

They’re crows.  Or ravens, maybe.  She’s not sure how to tell the difference.

 

There’s a whole roost of them, scattered throughout the trees around her.  Their heads are tucked into their wings, and she has to squint at them for a couple of seconds to piece together what she’s really looking at.  A sort of deep, clear calm settles into her as she stares up at them.  After a couple of minutes she pulls herself properly onto her branch and sits there, crossing her legs and folding her arms.  A tension she hadn’t really been aware of bleeds out of her shoulders.  When she closes her eyes and concentrates on it, she can feel every single crow, each distinct in a thousand tiny ways from the others, but overall the same, too.

 

_One tree, many leaves,_ she thinks, wryly.

 

It’s nice.  Grounding.  With the other stuff, the bright stuff, everything is always reaching _up_ and _out_ , like flowers turning their faces towards the sunlight, or tall trees growing into the sky.  It’s exhausting.  But _this_ feeling, this sinks down and down.  It spreads slowly, with a great hunger but an equal patience.  There’s no eagerness, no desperation.   This feeling doesn’t reach for anything, because everything, in time, will come to it.

 

She wonders how something like this gave rise to someone like Mandrake, to creatures like the boggans, or even her dad.  But however strongly _she_ feels it, she knows it’s only a teeny, tiny piece of their own nature to the crows.  The same way it used to be to her.

 

She’s not really sure how long she sits there, watching the sleeping birds.  It feels like a long time, but it probably isn’t.  She’s roused from her weird semi-meditation by another feeling, similar to the crows but coming in much stronger.  Bigger.  In the distance she hears the crashing _thud_ of something large and loud moving around, and it piques her curiosity.  Some of the crows rustle their feathers in sleepy discontent.  She almost wants to go and shush whatever’s moving around so noisily on their behalf.

 

It moves closer, and her curiosity gets the best of her.  She bounds back down through the tree branches, landing a little awkwardly in a nearby fern before taking off towards the source of the noise.  A shining, yellow glow grabs her attention.  But it isn’t until she gets close enough to hear the distinct booming of footsteps that she puts it together.

 

“Dad,” she whispers.

 

The yellow light is glowing from his helmet.  He’s crashing and turning, a surreal tableau in perpetual slow motion.  One of his hands is clenched around the map from his office, though it’s tattered and torn.  He looks cold, a little dirty, a little wild-eyed.

 

“MAAA…RRYYY… KAAATHE… RRIIINE…!” he calls, and for a second, she thinks he’s seen her.

 

But he’s looking in completely the wrong direction, and besides which, it’s dark, and she is very small and standing between two tree roots.  So, probably not.

 

Slowly, ever-so-slowly, he raises his hands to his mouth, and calls again.  She can feel the air vibrating around him.  He’s got some bumps and bruises, overlaying a peaceful, dark center that seems at odds with his usual, frenetic energy. Or maybe it only _seems_ peaceful to her, because of how she feels it? Is how she feels it how it really is, or only how it seems to her new perceptions?

 

Does that even matter?

 

_Is he… looking for me?_ she wonders, confused for a moment until she remembers.  The map.  The pin.  When he’d woken up, he must have realized that she’d put it there for him.  He’d seen her, after all.  The forest is a big place, even for big people.  She’d pointed him in the right direction – they’re close to Moonhaven, after all – and he’d come looking, maybe last night as well as tonight.  The thought warms her a little bit, even as a tiny voice in the back of her mind wonders if he’d have bothered if her current situation hadn’t coincided so neatly with his own obsession.  She pushes the thought aside.  Now’s not the time for bitterness, not about this.

 

She hesitates, for a moment, glancing down at herself.

 

But she can’t just leave him searching for her out here.  If she knows one thing for sure about her dad, it’s that he’s like a dog with a bone when he gets an idea in his head.  He won’t ever let up.

 

Taking in a fortifying breath, she rushes forward, catching the cuff of one of his pant legs. With some effort, she manages to yank it hard enough to get him to look down towards her.

 

“Dad!” she calls up, waving her arms around, like she’s trying to signal a plane.

 

With agonizing slowness, he catches sight of her and bends down. It’s so weird to see him like this, when she knows that, really, he’s probably moving a mile a minute, freaking out and straightening his glasses and gesturing wildly. It’s also incredibly frustrating. She has to _wait_ for him to see her, _wait_ for him to form his words, _wait_ for him to figure out that, yes, she’s really there, she’s really tiny, she’s really hanging onto his pant leg and moving fast as a hummingbird. _Wait_ for him to reach down a hand that she can clamber onto, and then lift her up, and it feels like this is taking _all night_ even though it’s not.

 

“MMMAAARRRYYYYYY… KAAATHERINNNNE…?”

 

“Yes, Dad, it’s really me!” she says, taking care to speak as slowly and loudly as she can in return. “I know I look a little different.”

 

“YYYOOUUU’VVVEE… SHRUUUUNKKK…! HOWWWW… DIIIDDD… THIIISSS… HAAAAPENNN?”

 

“It’s a long story.”

 

“WHAAAT… DIIID… YOUUU… SSSAAAYYY?”

 

“IT’S A LONG STORY!” she bellows at him. He’s wearing some weird equipment on his head, but some of the pieces look a little unfinished, and one of the eye pieces seems to be outright broken. Just how long has he been stumbling around the forest in the dark?

 

He tries to get some of the details out of her, but it’s really not working with the unfortunate time differential thing going on. Fortunately, her dad figures _that_ out in what is, to him, probably a very timely manner. MK makes herself comfortable on his palm as he starts heading back to the house, steadying herself by hanging onto his thumb.

 

Funny. She never figured she’d ever be small enough for him to carry around again.

 

He breaks into a run, but even so it feels sort of like she’s on one of the kiddie rides at an amusement park – the kind that are designed to go slow, and not be at all frightening. He holds her carefully, not jostling her much even when he stumbles, though she’s honestly not sure how much of that is because of his caution and how much of it has to do with the incredible amount of advance warning she gets every time he so much as twitches. Still, it’s not… bad. Which isn’t what she would have guessed. She feels strangely calm, all things considered, even when he flails up the porch steps in slow motion, and even when Ozzie comes bounding up to them, all fur and slobber and earthy-dark energy.

 

It’s strange, she thinks, what counts as which. She wonders how it’s determined. The answer to that question isn’t included in her new, personal encyclopaedia of knowledge.

 

Eventually, her dad sets her gently down onto a table, and peers at her with a mixture of alarm and fascination. He seems to get distracted by her clothes at one point.

 

He _doesn’t_ seem to notice her new complexion or the change in her hair, but she supposes she can forgive him for that, considering that she’s miniature and all.

 

“WHHHAAATTT… HAAAAPPPPPENNNNED…?” he asks, and she sucks in a breath, and does her best to try and explain.

 

It’s not easy. He pulls out a few gadgets – cameras to film her with, mostly, which makes her nervous, and also a microphone, which he uses to record her responses, slow them down, and then pump up the volume and play back for himself. After a few hiccoughs, he starts talking into the thing himself, and playing a sped-up version for her benefit, too. She still has to wait while he makes the recordings, though, listening to his slow, booming voice all the while.

 

As communication goes, she’s had less frustrating experiences in her life.

 

But, she figures, considering everything… she probably owes him a little patience.

 

So she does the best she can. She tells him about the pod and Queen Tara shrinking her and meeting Ronin and Nod and the disaster at Nim’s tree and sneaking back into the house to get boggan gear and rescuing the pod and trying to deal with Mandrake’s summoned bats and watching the pod bloom in darkness. She leaves out her own near-death experience, and Ronin’s, and glosses over the specifics of Nim’s records, because she’s not sure how he would react to those things but she thinks, whatever way he did, it would involve more drama than she’s feeling up to handling at the moment.

 

She mentions being chosen, though. She can’t quite bring herself not to. And in doing so, she also mentions that she can’t work the magic to make herself big again.

 

Her dad peers solemnly down at her, and she hears the dull roar of his voice, though she doesn’t really pay attention to his words until he speeds them up and plays them back for her.

 

“Don’t worry, MK. We’ll figure out what to do.”

 

“Thanks, Dad,” she says, even though she knows there’s nothing he can really do for her now. Practically speaking.

 

But she doesn’t feel like being practical right this minute. She feels like hiding, instead – just pretending for a _little while_ that there’s actually a responsible adult she can dump all of this onto, and burrowing under a blanket somewhere to wait for the storm to pass. It’s not an option. But it’s a nice enough fantasy that when her dad offers to take her to her room ‘for some rest’, she lets him, and does as reasonable an approximation of burrowing as she can in her giant bed with its stale, too-heavy blankets.

 

That gets old about five seconds after her dad closes the door behind him, though, and so she leaps and climbs her way onto the windowsill instead.

 

Outside, something bright swoops past. She wonders what kind of nocturnal animal it is this time. Maybe an owl? Or a whole herd of moths?

 

Her windowsill is _filthy._

 

“Jeez, Dad, learn to dust,” she murmurs, as her senses fixate on a few dead fly carcasses, clustered near an opening where the frame has been improperly sealed. A cold draft slips through. She raises a hand to it, and then jumps up and opens the window latch, smiling a little when she catches it on the first try. The night air feels good. But then, so does the house – a sanctuary of dead wood and stillness, even with the distant sounds of her father thundering around downstairs.

 

Something hums in the back of her head, and that’s about as much warning as she gets.

 

“Thanks,” Ronin says, clambering smoothly in through the now-open window.

 

MK almost leaps off the windowsill in shock, and then almost smothers them both in a cloud of impenetrable darkness.

 

“Gah!” she says, smoothly. “Ronin! What the heck?”

 

“This place is filthy,” Ronin notes, disdainfully nudging one of the fly carcasses out of his way.

 

“Excuse me? This is my house,” MK objects. “You can’t just jump in here and start criticizing its tidiness, okay?”

 

“I assumed that was what you let me in for,” he says, all butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth innocent sincerity, and she doesn’t buy it for a second. She folds her arms and stares him down, but, yeah, queenly powers and authority or not, she isn’t winning a staring contest against Ronin. After a minute she gives up.

 

“Well, it’s not, and I didn’t even mean to let you in,” she says, plonking pointedly down amidst the windowsill’s dust bunnies. She waves a hand and sends them tumbling out of the open window, helping with the cleanliness problem at least _somewhat._ Her eyes dart around, as she feels another bright, itchy presence, but she relaxes a little when she sees it’s just Ronin’s hummingbird. Good. She’s still mad at Nod. She’s not even a tiny bit disappointed that he apparently didn’t come looking for her.

 

She steadfastly avoids looking at Ronin, even when he settles down onto the windowsill beside her, staring out at the open night in front of them.

 

She wants to hold onto her irritation, but it doesn’t seem inclined to cooperate.

 

They sit in silence for a while.  Downstairs she can hear her dad stomping around, exclaiming over things in a low, slow drone that drifts up more in vibrations than discernable words.  Like some kind of subterranean thunder storm. Outside the bedroom door, Ozzie is a bundle of old scars and soothing energy.  Ronin is a bright ball of light next to her, his injuries dimmer now, no longer obscuring the heart of him.  But somehow, the brightness doesn’t bother her so much when she’s not utterly surrounded by it. In small doses it’s kind of pleasant, even.

 

“I’m not sure I can go back,” she admits, at length.

 

“What would you rather do, then?” Ronin asks.  “Stay here?”

 

Immediately, MK shakes her head.  No, she can’t stay here, either.  Trying to communicate with her father is already driving her a little crazy – albeit for completely different reasons than it usually would – and there isn’t much that she can do here except maybe sit on her hands and hope that science provides a solution where magic has failed to.  Or, well, where _her_ magic has failed to, anyway.  She won’t just wait around for something that might never come.  Besides which, the Imbalance at the back of her senses is still pressing at her, demanding her attention with increasing urgency.  She’s not sure if it’s because it’s getting worse, or because she’s getting better at sorting out her new senses.

 

“If I go back, will they lock me up?” she asks.  Ronin looks at her and scowls.

 

“Who?” he asks.

 

“The councillors,” she replies.  “Nod said that they were talking about locking me up.  He said I was too… boggan-ish.  That people were scared of me.”  She wonders if she should mention the flowers that she accidentally killed.  She can’t quite bring herself to.

 

Ronin mutters something unpleasant-sounding under his breath.

 

“Nod’s got some fine skills when he’s not being an idiot, but a keen grasp of politics isn’t one of them,” he tells her.  “If he overheard anybody talking, then that’s just what he heard; talk.  The safety of the forest is the prerogative of the Leafmen.  Nobody’s locking _anybody_ up without our say-so, least of all our own queen.”

 

“But I’m not that kind of queen,” MK points out.

 

“I’ll kneel again,” he threatens.

 

“Please don’t,” she begs, raising her hands in a forestalling gesture.

 

“What did you think that was all about, anyway?” he asks.  “I don’t put my knee down for just anybody, you know.  You’re Tara’s chosen successor.  That makes you the Queen of the Forest; anything else is just a minor detail, as far as I’m concerned.”

 

The words ease some of her fears, and warm something inside of her.  She lets out a breath.

 

“But not everybody feels that way,” she points out all the same.

 

“Eh.  So you don’t have universal approval.  We can work around it,” he assures her, meeting her eye.  “You’re still not alone.”

 

She holds his stare for a couple of seconds, and then nods.

 

“Okay,” she says.  “Okay, I’ll go back.”

 

She smiles at him, and he nods at her, and she can feel the rightness of the decision.

 

Or maybe that’s not a general sense of universal approval she’s feeling, she thinks, suddenly, as something dark and large and feathery swoops into view, breaking away from the blackness of the night.  She stares in shock as a curved set of talons reach for her, a sudden cacophony of cawing in her ears.  Something shrieks further behind it, and a black spear goes whipping through the air at her side.  There’s barely enough time for her to think _oh crap_ , but Ronin is already on his feet, dodging the spear and dragging her out of the way.  The crow’s grab for her misses by a hair’s breadth.  There’s a rapid succession of _thud, thud, thud_ sounds as three more spears launch towards them, lodging themselves a scant distance from Ronin’s feet.

 

He yanks her off the windowsill and down to the floor.  She stumbles on the landing.  Something clatters noisily against the top half the window, and outside the door, Ozzie starts to bark.

 

“Quick, under there,” Ronin tells her, drawing his sword and gesturing to the shadows beneath her bed.  MK all but tumbles into the dust bunnies, a sort of panicked confusion chief in her mind.  Everything she _knows_ says that the beings clustered at her window shouldn’t be attacking her.  It feels all wrong.  Ronin takes up a position in front of her, dodging two more spear throws before several heavily-clawed feet land next to his, and she hears more than she sees the exchange of blows.

 

She can feel the dead trees in the wooden floorboards underneath them.  She clenches a fist and they spike upwards, a blackening circle that spreads out around Ronin and launches his opponents away from him.  He staggers backwards a step and nearly trips on it himself, before MK pushes that part of it flat again and gives him a little more space.  She presses both of her hands to the floor, and feels the boggans standing there.  She can hear the crow rattling around somewhere near her ceiling, too, and her father, slowly thundering his way towards the stairs.  The wood cracks upwards, rough and untidy, but enough to close around the boggans’ ankles.  She accidentally inhales a mouthful of dust bunny, and coughs around it, spitting out the rough fibers.

 

“Ugh.”

 

Ronin glances back at her.

 

“That’s your doing?” he asks, nodding towards the floor.

 

“Yup,” she assures him.

 

He nods.

 

“Stay there,” he tells her.

 

She pulls herself up out of the dust bunnies, brushing them off.  They don’t stick this time, obliging her intentions, and she can feel them, the bits of dead skin cells and pet dander and dust mites.  She’s _really_ glad that her new ability to pick up on that has also come with a shiny new capacity for not caring much about it.  Ronin gives her a disgruntled look, but otherwise doesn’t try to stop her.  In front of them, six boggans are yanking at their legs, trying to get the warped floor to let go of them.  Outside, her dad gets to the top of the stairs.

 

Any minute now he’s going to open her door, and probably unintentionally let Ozzie in, and she kind of doesn’t want to see what will happen if Ozzie gets his teeth on six incapacitated boggans.

 

The boggans go still when they see her.  The magic of decay clings to them like a second skin, a thin layer resting overtop of and deriving from their natural inclinations.  They cover a broad range of sizes and shapes between them all.  Some are skinny and sharp.  Others are round and bulky.  Their uncertainty about the situation seems almost visceral.

 

“Why did you attack us?” she demands.

 

They glance at one another.

 

“Purslane!” one blurts, and his nearest fellow bats and arm at him – a strike that would have landed if his feet weren’t fixed too far away.  He topples, awkwardly, and his ankles bruise against the unyielding wood.

 

MK raises an eyebrow.

 

“Purse-Lane?” she asks, shooting a questioning look at Ronin.  He shakes his head, apparently as strapped for insight as she is.

 

“We’re under orders,” the boggan continues.  Another one hisses.

 

“Be quiet!” he says.  “She said to keep quiet!”

 

“But it’s _her,_ ” the talkative boggan argues.

 

“The Leafman’s right there, you moron!”

 

That gets him to stop, much to MK’s annoyance.  Ronin strides forward.

 

“Oh, please, don’t go quiet on _my_ account,” he says, leveling the tip of his blade at the nearest boggan’s throat.  “So, who is this Purslane?  What’s she after?”

 

The boggan sneers back at him, but says nothing.  MK rolls her eyes.

 

“In a couple of seconds a stomper is going to open that door,” she says, pointing.  “And when he does, a gigantic three-legged dog is going to come running in here and happily munch you to pieces.  If you answer his questions, I’ll let you go so you can get a running start.  If you don’t, we’ll just leave you here.  Your call.”

 

The boggan under Ronin’s sword continues to look defiant.  But his five fellows exchange uncertain glances.

 

“We were just supposed to bring you back,” one of them blurts, cracking like a dry twig.  “That’s all.  Just find you and bring you back, _save_ you from the jinn.”  He shoots Ronin and ugly look.

 

“Jinn?” MK wonders.

 

“Them.  Their kind,” the boggan says, his lip curling up in distaste.

 

“Shut up!” the hold-out snaps, his head still tipped back to avoid the sharp edge of Ronin’s sword.  “Shut up, she’ll kill us all for talking!”

 

“Kill us worse than a hungry dog?” the other demands, which seems to give him pause.

 

“Maybe,” he says.  From its perch on the windowsill, nearly forgotten, the crow caws.  MK jumps a little, and the bedroom door creaks from the heavy weight of her father’s hand on the knob.  Distorted and distant, she hears his voice saying her name.

 

She clenches a fist, and then stretches her fingers.  The mangled flooring releases the boggans.

 

“Get out of here,” she says.  Ronin raises an eyebrow.

 

But the boggans only look at her, and then do as told; leaping towards the window, some dropping down off the sill, the rest clambering onto the crow.  The door opens, and Ozzie comes barrelling in, his paws pounding awkwardly over the raised wood.  He barks and misses crashing into them by a narrow margin, skidding off towards the wall.  Her father’s footsteps boom around them.

 

“EMMM… KAAAAY?” he asks, peering slowly down at her and Ronin, and then slowly up towards the open window.  The room is obviously a mess.

 

MK frowns, her gaze shifting over to where a single black crow feather has landed nearby.

 

“I have to say goodbye,” she says.

 

“That’ll take a while,” Ronin notes, with more wryness than she appreciates, even though she knows he has a point.  He leaps up to her desk.  “I’ll check and make sure there aren’t any ambushes waiting for us.”

 

“Don’t get caught in one,” she replies.

 

“Of course not.  What do you take me for?  An amateur?”

 

“I’m just saying, it’ll be really embarrassing for you if I have to come rescue you or something,” she says.

 

“You, rescuing me.  Sure.  _That’ll_ be the day.”

 

“You’ve jinxed it.  It’s actually gonna happen now.”

 

Ronin snorts and disappears over the ledge, and MK’s officially out of ways to put off figuring out how to explain this to her dad.  Her dad, who’s watching Ronin jump with his mouth wide open, and is about half a second away from tripping over her mangled floor, which he doesn’t seem to have noticed yet.  MK flattens it out before he can.  The damage is still obvious, but at least it isn’t uneven anymore.  She clambers up to the desk, pushing past some stray junk that’s accumulated there in her absence; old batteries, half-finished gadgets, tools that are actually too heavy for her to move.  She roots around until she finds what she’s looking for – a pen, and a scrap of paper.  There’s something written on one side, but she turns it over, and hefts the pen up so it’s leaning against her shoulder.

 

Writing letters as tall as herself is a pretty good workout.  She decides to forgo the formalities and sticks to text-speak rules, for brevity’s sake.  When she’s done, she checks over her deeply explanatory and heartfelt farewell.

 

‘G2 GO’.

 

She winces, but nevertheless presents it for her father’s perusal.

 

“GEEE… TWOOO… GEEE… OHHHH…” he reads.  MK resists the urge to tap her foot impatiently as he slowly, oh-so-slowly, asks if it’s some kind of code.  She puts the paper back down, and scrawls out three more large, slanted letters.

 

‘BYE’.

 

“BYYYYEEEE?” he asks.  “YOOOOOUUUU’RRREEE… GOOOOINNNNGGG… SOOOMMME… WHHHERRRE?”

 

_I’ll be back,_ she wants to promise, but she doesn’t have the energy to add it in, and she’s dishearteningly uncertain as to whether or not it would be a lie anyway.  She bounds up towards his sleeve, gripping the coarse fabric and climbing it all the way to his shoulder.  He’s still turning, bit by bit, when she makes her way to the side of his head, and presses a kiss to his gigantic cheek.  It’s too brief, she knows, and he might not even realize she’s done it.  But she does it anyway, and then she hops back down, listening to him try and form another word even as she heads straight for the window.  She waits until he’s looking straight at her, and then slowly, pointedly, so that he can see it, she blows him a kiss goodbye.  The way she used to do when she was really little.  She draws it out as much as possible, until she sees his eyebrows begin to tick upwards, and she knows he’s caught the gesture.

 

For now, it’ll have to be enough.

 

Then she turns, and there’s Ronin, waiting for her on his bird.  No boggans in sight or sensing range. She drops into the saddle behind him.

 

“Let’s go,” she says.

 

Ronin stays mercifully silent as they take off.  Back towards the forest again.  The ground zips by beneath them in a blur, and almost as soon as they pass the treeline, another contingent of Leafmen fall into place behind them.  MK recognizes a couple of faces from the various fights she’s seen them in, but Nod isn’t among them.

 

“Nod didn’t come?” she asks, unable to help herself.

 

“He went to Nim Galuu’s,” Ronin explains.  “Figured you might have gone looking for answers there.”

 

“Oh.”

 

She might have, she realizes, if she hadn’t run into her dad instead.  She’s kind of glad that she did.  The tentative new bond that had sprung up between her and Nod has been sent veering drastically off course, and it’s painful.  She has no idea how to fix it, or even if it can be fixed.  At the very least she can put it off for a while, and so she does, glancing at the other Leafmen instead.  She wonders if they really share Ronin’s faith in her, or if they’re just following his lead.

 

A whisper prickles at the back of her mind, and she whips her head sharply to the left, unwilling to be caught off-guard for a third time.

 

“Something’s coming towards us,” she says.

 

“Boggans?” Ronin asks.

 

“I’m not sure,” she admits.  “Either it’s a lot of them or it’s one very big thing.”

 

Ronin makes some kind of hand signal to the other Leafmen, and then sends his bird spiralling down and the left, hooking around a nearby tree before zig-zagging through several others.  The first arrow misses them by a wide margin.  MK senses it rather than seeing it, drawn in by the poisoned tip, sickly and potent.  Deeper shadows flit between the trees, calling to her with unconscious kinship.  A crow rider swoops down towards them, and she twists her wrist and sends his saddle spinning, tangling him with his bird’s legs and forcing them both to back off.  In front of her, Ronin is radiating tension, spurring his hummingbird on as fast as it can go in the darkness.

 

MK doesn’t properly recognize the warning she gets for what comes next.  She feels a sudden rush of awareness, and she’s still trying to figure out where it’s coming from when the underbrush all but _explodes_ in front of them in a flurry of flying twigs and dark grey fur.  She gets a glimpse of sharp teeth and wild eyes in the moonlight before Ronin sends them into a steep climb to avoid them, and she has to hang on to him for dear life or risk falling out of the saddle.  For one horribly confused minute she thinks that Ozzie has somehow gotten out of the house and grown to an even more comparatively mammoth size, and then she realizes.

 

It’s a fox.

 

She looks down as Ronin pulls them out of their sharp incline, and sure enough, there it is.  Its coat is matted and it’s covered in old pains and worn scars, faded and stretched thin from the wear and tear of a hard life.  Boggans cling to its fur, dangling from harnesses arrayed along its back.  It’s snarling mad and furious, slow in the way that all big things are, but also faster than most of the other ones she’s seen.  At the top of its neck, just behind its ears, is a saddle.  A single boggan, clad in matching grey fur, is seated there, one hand gripping tightly to cruel reigns, the other clenched around the handle of a sword.  MK catches the glare from a single gimlet eye before the entire scene vanishes from sight.

 

Arrows _thunk_ against the treetops around them as they zigzag and swerve.  The other Leafmen are bright spots of contrast on the periphery of her perception as they fend off their attackers.  She wonders what the plan is, exactly.  They’re clearly outnumbered, and their pursuers aren’t showing any signs of letting up.  And it still doesn’t feel like it should be happening at all, even though it’s ridiculous for her to be surprised by a boggan attack at this point.

 

A dull, echoing growl chases after them, and something clenches in her chest.  _That poor fox_ , she thinks.

 

_That poor fox is trying to kill us,_ she then immediately reminds herself.  She twists in the saddle, slightly, and manages to assuage both concerns by concentrating and reaching out to the dead vole leather straps affixed to its fur.  They snap violently outwards on her command, sending almost half of the boggans tumbling away, and then twist sideways and writhe, dropping the rest in short order.  The saddle bucks violently, and the chief rider is left dangling by the reigns.  She sends those spinning sideways.  Freed from at least some of its bonds, the fox stops and shakes, whining as the straps pull painfully in places.  She’s so focused on her task that she misses the boggans on the branch above them until one has dropped down nearly on top of her.

 

A thick arm hooks around her waist, and just like that, she’s slipping from the back of the saddle.  Ronin reaches back for her, but the angle is awkward, and the boggan gripping her has a blade in its other hand.

 

The edge of the weapon cuts along the bottom of Ronin’s arm, slitting the straps on his arm brace and spilling red blood across the back of the hummingbird’s saddle.  She can feel the poison on it, and she can feel the split-second instant when it moves to Ronin’s flesh, biting hungrily into the wound.

 

_“No!”_ she gasps, one hand flailing instinctively forward, grabbing at the poison and _yanking_ fiercely.  It flies dramatically free in a tiny stream of black ichor.  But the success is costly; with her attention divided she can’t focus on the boggan who has her.  Ronin’s face goes sheet-white with horror, and then something bites into the side of her neck, sickly-sweet with not-quite-poison that floods into her bloodstream.

 

Black spots eat up her vision – not shadows, but her eyes failing. Her senses go swiftly dull, and her limbs sluggish. The grip of her boggan captor is tight around her as they land on a branch, but surprisingly careful enough to avoid smacking her against anything. He takes off running again almost straight away. More boggans surge up around them, and something’s following – a bird? Ronin? – and it’s bright but it’s losing ground in the dark. An arrow _thunks_ into the shoulder of the boggan carrying her, and she winces as he staggers under the injury.

 

With a shriek he tosses her to one of his many fellows, and she finds herself spinning, caught, reaching for – for something? Something to help – she doesn’t remember, but there is a face like a shark above her, and then leaping, jumping, landing on black feathers and she should be fighting, but she can’t recall why, or who, or how she’s even still awake. Or if she is. Maybe it’s a dream?

 

In her blood. It’s in her blood. Like sugary syrup, too sweet and slow, and she needs to get it out. She needs…

 

She sucks in a breath, and tries to _focus_ , and instead finds herself falling into her own mind.


	4. Buried

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for imprisonment and an OC villain in this chapter. And thanks to everyone who's kept on reading this, despite the long waits and sporadic updates!

 

 

She dreams that she is in a square, open cemetery plot.  Above her she can just barely see the moon, peeking out from behind a cover of thick, grey clouds.  The air smells heavily of the earth around her.  A long, wide shape flits into her view, and dumps a pile of loose dirt on top of her.  And then another.  A shovel, she realizes.  She stares up towards the sky as the grave fills around her, and somehow never loses sight of it, even when she can feel the grit pressing against her cheeks and tumbling into her nostrils.  It slips into her mouth and lies heavily on her tongue.

 

She knows it’s over when she hears the shovel patting against the top of the grave.  It echoes, the way her father’s footsteps do now.  She closes her eyes.

 

When she opens them again, she’s still surrounded by dark walls of earth.  But these are smoother and further away, round where the grave had been square.  Her head is pounding.  Her arms hurt, and she feels wrong, off-balance and disoriented.  There’s a fog behind her eyes.  She doesn’t know what’s happened or where she is; even so, she knows it’s nighttime.  She can feel it humming underneath her skin, prickling at her fingertips. But is it the same night? It feels more like she might have missed a day. Or several.

 

There’s a deep, steady stillness all around her.  There’s something wrong with it, she knows, but she’s too out of it to try and put together what it might be, so instead she lets it soothe her as she focuses on breathing, and then blinking, and then trying to move.

 

The source of the pain in her arms becomes immediately apparent when she attempts to lower them, and feels resistance.  She looks up, and stares blearily at the dark grey chains that have been wrapped around her wrists.  They’re holding her upright, keeping her weight on her shoulders and arms.  There are angry red marks where that metal has pressed against her skin.  A spike of panic shoots through her, clearing away the worst of her haziness.  She forces her numb legs under herself, and flinches at the horrifying pins and needles that shoot through her every limb as she finally manages to shift her weight and stand.  It’s not as bad as she imagines it would be if she was big again, and weighed more, but it’s still pretty awful.

 

The room around her is dark and sparse.  There are no windows.  Just a suspiciously clean floor, and a small opening across from her.  She can feel dead things all around, up above her and down below her, but nothing really substantial or close by.

 

There is not even the barest hint of light or jinn.

 

The metal holding her is rough, and covered in flecks of faded paint.  It looks like it might have been a bracelet or maybe part of a necklace in a past life.  She remembers the cheap costume jewelry her mom used to get her when she was younger, and checks the links for any gaps, or places where she might push them open.  But her search comes up empty.  For all that they are old and weathered, they are also cleanly sealed and uncooperative.

 

Her heart hammers in her chest as she realizes her helplessness.  The metal, or plastic, doesn’t speak to her.  She can’t make it move.  There’s nothing close enough for her to reach, and she has no idea where she is.  For all she knows, the boggans could be planning to leave her here until she starves to death.  The fact that she’s even here is troubling enough.  Ronin wouldn’t have let them take her without following, she knows.  Even if he’s fine and out there looking for her, wherever she’s being kept is obviously well-hidden.  He might never find her.

 

_Someone will come,_ she assures herself.  Someone has to come.  Even if it’s just the people who captured her, they probably won’t just _leave_ her without even taking the opportunity to gloat or something.

 

Right?

 

She presses back against the earthen wall behind her, trying to alleviate more of the pressure on her arms, and sucks in a long breath.  It tastes stale and dry.  Her eyes slip closed, and she tries to focus on pinpointing the closest and strongest sensations she can find.  There’s something deep below her.  Old bones, maybe.  Or petrified tree roots.  She tugs, but it’s like trying to pull a screw loose with her fingernails.  It’s buried in too deep, and her grasp is too tenuous.

 

If she can’t do it _now,_ in the dead of night, then she’s never going to be able to do it all.

 

She’s not sure how long she keeps at it for.  Long enough that she can feel the creeping approach of dawn, and the pain in her arms has become a constant, stabbing ache.  Her efforts prove less than fruitful, but her hopes spike up again when she feels a presence moving closer towards her from the direction of the tunnel.  It’s dark.  A boggan, probably.  She lets her focus shift, but she can only sense the barest hint of decay clinging to the figure.

 

The reason why becomes apparent when the boggan emerges from the tunnel.

 

She’s female, MK suspects.  There’s a kind of… she wouldn’t really call it _softness,_ but maybe more like a _roundness_ to her shape that hints at it.  It wouldn’t ordinarily be obvious, but she’s dressed strangely, which explains why she can’t sense much about her.  The only thing she’s wearing is an incongruous and thin layer of long-dead plant matter.  A jinn tunic of some kind, maybe. It looks awkward and ill-suited to her tall, broad-shouldered frame, like it was made for someone of a completely different size and shape.  Ropey muscles and old scars cover her skin, trailing up her forearms and stretching down even so far as her bare feet.  Something that looks suspiciously like a plastic bottle cap is clutched in her hands.  It sloshes a little as she steps down from the tunnel, and stares at MK. Her face is vaguely familiar.

 

It’s the saddled rider from the fox, she realizes.

 

“Sorry about the poor accommodations, Your Royal Highness,” she says, in an almost lyrical sort of voice.  “But we needed to put you somewhere where you couldn’t cause any trouble.”

 

“You’re Purse-Lane,” MK guesses.  Her voice comes out rough and dry.  The boggan affects a mocking sort of half-bow.

 

“At your service,” she confirms.  “Or not really, as the case may be.”

 

“What do you want?” she asks.  Dawn’s coming.  Her night-given strength is starting to seep away, leaving her with just her sorely tired self to rely on.

 

“Oh, I want a lot of things,” Purslane tells her, idly dropping her bottle cap onto the ground.  The water inside wobbles unsteadily, but stays put.  “Power, mostly.  Respect.  A sufficiently impressive mate, a few grubs, but that’s later on down the line.  For the moment, what I’m really looking for,” she says, in a playfully conspiring tone of voice, “is a _throne._ ”

 

MK blinks at her.

 

“Huh?” she intelligently replies.

 

Purslane stares at her for a couple of seconds, and then looks down at her clawed hands.

 

“I suppose I should thank you, properly, for killing Mandrake,” she says.  “With him and Dagda gone, it left something of an… _opening_ , if you will.”

 

“Mandrake’s not dead,” she corrects, before her brain catches up with her mouth and she thinks that maybe she shouldn’t reveal that.

 

Purslane raises an eyebrow at her.

 

“Really?” she asks.

 

MK shrugs.  Or manages an approximation of a shrug, and then proceeds to immediately regret it.

 

“Hm.  Pity.  Do you think the Leafmen will execute him soon?”

 

“I don’t know,” she admits.

 

“Bah, I suppose it doesn’t matter,” Purslane decides, waving one arm dismissively.  “Did they keep his staff, though?  That could be useful.”

 

“They destroyed it,” she says, feeling a little bit more confident that this assertion, at least, is a wise one to make.  Even though it’s not actually true.

 

The boggan rolls her eyes.

 

“Of course.  Of _course_ you destroyed the one useful thing about the man and then decided to procrastinate on actually getting rid of _him._   Well, my gratitude is officially retracted now,” she declares.

 

“Oh no, however shall I live with the disappointment?” MK sarcastically replies.

 

Purslane’s mouth curves upwards in a distinctly unfriendly-looking smile.

 

“You know, you and I have a lot in common, really,” she says.  “Two powerful, ambitious women caught in the wake of an incredibly stupid power struggle, batted around like under-appreciated pawns in this age old bickering between the forces of light and darkness.  Under different circumstances, I might even be able to like you.”

 

MK stares.

 

Purslane shrugs.

 

“Well, in another life, maybe.  In this one, I’m afraid it’s just not going to work out.”  She leans in a little bit closer, and MK can smell the sourness of her breath.  “You have something I want.”

 

She clears her throat, trying not to feel as frightened as she is.

 

“And what’s that?” she wonders.

 

“Weren’t you listening?” Purslane demands.  “I want a _throne._   A real one.  Not some half-baked position at the top of this boggan pile, but a real, true position of authority.  And there’s only one of those in the whole of the forest.”  She reaches out, curving one claw underneath MK’s chin in a mocking parody of affection, clucking her tongue gently.  She shakes her head.  “Look at you,” she says.  “You don’t _really_ want this, do you?  Hmm?  No, of course you don’t.  You want to be one of _them_.  You want to ride around on pretty green birds… and… and… whatever else it is they do with their time.  So why not just pass it along to somebody who knows what to do with it?  It’d just be easier for everyone, really.”

 

MK stares at her.

 

“It doesn’t work like that,” she says.

 

Purslane sighs, and steps back.

 

“I was afraid you’d say something like that,” she replies.  “Well.  Never fear.  If your existence has proven anything, it’s that no one knows half as much about the old magic as they think they do.  ‘Where there’s a will, there’s a way’, and all that.  We’ll get things straightened out.”

 

“Go to hell,” MK snaps at her.

 

She throws her head back and laughs, much to her annoyance.

 

“Now that, there _,_ ” she says.  “That was _almost_ decent.  Oh, and before I forget,” she reaches down and scoops up the bottle cap again, bringing it forward until it’s just under MK’s chin.  The plastic is dull and hollow.  “Drink up.  We don’t exactly want you getting your strength back, but letting you die of dehydration would just be embarrassing.”

 

MK gives serious thought to just headbutting the whole thing straight into her captor’s smiling face.  But if she’s going to escape, it’ll probably take everything she has.  So after a couple awkward stop-and-start moments, she leans down and laps uncomfortably at the cap’s lukewarm contents.  A thought occurs to her.

 

“What about,” she begins, her voice coming out more smoothly now that her throat’s no longer parched, “you know – when I have to _go?”_

 

“Oh, this is only temporary until we can get some more security measures in place,” Purslane says, nodding towards her chains.  “Until then, hold it.  Or not.  I don’t particularly care.”

 

“Seriously? And then, what, I’m just supposed to go in the corner somewhere?” MK asks. “Gross.”

 

Her captor chuckles again.

 

“You know, it’s almost a shame that you’re not going to survive this,” she declares.

 

Then she takes back the bottle cap, and with another mocking little bow, heads back up through the tunnel she came in by.  MK listens to her leave, and tries not to let the fear rising up in her chest work itself into a boiling panic.  She ends up tugging ineffectually at her chains for a few minutes anyway, trying to drag them out of the wall behind through sheer brute force.  Admittedly not one of her strong suits.  She pulls until her wrists burn, and her skin splits open, smearing red splotches of blood against her sleeves.

 

Something trundles through the earth beneath her, close enough to send little tremors through her boots.  A mole, maybe.  She sags back against the wall.

 

Far overhead, the sun slowly crests over the horizon.  MK doesn’t quite sleep.  She’s too uncomfortable to manage it, and not sure if she should even try, despite her exhaustion.  Instead she finds herself lingering in a sort of half-sleep.  Her thoughts turn disjointed and vague, nearly like dreams as she drifts in and out of them.  She remembers being a little girl, playing in the back yard with Ozzie when he was just a puppy, looking for ladybugs and chasing after butterflies.  Imagining fairies dancing between the overgrown stalks of grass.

 

“Are fairies real?” she’d asked her father, back before his preoccupation with tiny forest societies had begun.

 

“I haven’t seen any,” he’d told her.  “But I don’t see why they couldn’t be.  The world’s a big place!  There are lots of amazing things out there, just waiting to be discovered.”

 

She’d thought that her father was the smartest man in the whole world.

 

After her mother had packed her away, trading wide backyards and tall green trees for the noise and bustle of the city, she’d found an old copy of _The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe_ in one of the boxes that had ended up in the bottom of her closet.  On a whim she’d reread it, until it had come to the part where the older children went to see the Professor, because their youngest sister was claiming to have seen a world that couldn’t possibly exist.  The professor had said that little Lucy was either telling lies, or going mad, or telling the truth.

 

The sentiment had brought up uncomfortable thoughts of her father.  She’d put the book away again.  It had never been easy, to think of her father going mad.

 

She wonders, now, why she never considered that he might just be telling the truth instead.  Why her mother never did.  Why it had all seemed so impossible, when apparently, it had been true all along.  She remembers the look on her father’s face, after his worst fight with her mother.

 

“I’ll prove it to you,” he’d said.

 

“I don’t want that,” her mother had replied, while little Mary Katherine hid at the top of the stairs, clutching Ozzie to her chest.  “I want you to get _help._ ”

 

“I’m not crazy!” her father had insisted.  His eyes had been huge, his expression so earnest, so beseeching as he’d looked at her – searching for a faith that wasn’t there anymore.

 

_Maybe I’ve gone crazy,_ she thinks.  _Maybe that’s the answer.  Maybe it was hereditary or something._

 

She knows it’s not true.  But then, isn’t certainty a sign of a madness?  She thinks maybe she read that somewhere.  Behind closed eyelids, her memories slip into indistinct images of tunnels and wardrobes, winding passages that open up to monstrously huge trees that shine with lights at the top of them, like lampposts made of moonlight.  She climbs inside and suddenly she’s in Nim Galuu’s tree, instead, watching as all the chronicles of the forest write themselves out around her.  Something occurs to her, but then it slips away again, lost to the haziness of her near-dreams.  She reaches for a nearby scroll.  Her arm jerks in the waking world.

 

The movement sends a jolt of pain through her, and snaps her back to reality.  She takes in a deep breath.  Her nose itches.  Trying to scratch it against her shoulder only gets her hair up it, though.  She scowls and tries to ignore it, scrunching up her face, feeling the frustration crawling up her skin.  Distantly, she can hear sounds of movement at the far end of the lone tunnel leading towards her.  There’s the indistinct feeling of beings moving around, too.  It’s a little maddening to know that if there was just _something_ , if she could just _get out_ , then she could probably escape.  But everything is ever-so-slightly out of reach.  Even her own stupid nose.

 

Although she can feel herself flagging again already, she forces her attention back onto to the maybe-bones deep beneath the ground that she’d been trying to move before Purslane arrived.  She has even less success with it now than before, but at least she can try. It’s better than doing nothing.

 

Time crawls by.  MK thinks that it’s never moved slower, not even in the pauses between her dad’s words after she shrank, or on the worst school days when all she could do was stare at the clock and wish to be at the hospital instead.  She’d trade her right arm for the discomfort of a stuffy classroom instead of a dark dungeon.  When noon finally comes around, she knows that up above the day is bright, and a little too hot.  She temporarily abandons her efforts as her thoughts turn sluggish, and she slumps, reflexively darkening the already deep shadows around her.  Later on, she won’t be able to say if she stayed conscious the whole time or not.  Her thoughts become a messy blur, distorting her already confused perception of time, and it feels like all she can do is wait.

 

And wait.

 

And wait.

 

Just as her exhaustion finally begins to ebb again, she hears something slam in the distance.  Her heart speeds up, and she hopes, for a moment, that somehow it’s someone come to rescue her.  That the noise is the first sign of a skirmish.  She strains to hear the sounds of booted feet, or feel a telltale itch at the back of her teeth.

 

Instead she gets another boggan, clambering down the tunnel.

 

It’s a male one, this time, though he’s as strangely dressed as Purslane had been.  He’s big.  Big enough to make her worry, and in his hands he holds a curved metal blade; not exactly sharp, but lethal-looking all the same.  He stares at her with wary eyes.

 

“Keep still,” he growls.

 

Then, before MK can even think of a suitable response, he reaches out and grabs one of her wrists.

 

All shiny new queenly confidence aside, a surge of base, primal fear rushes through her.  He raises his weapon, and smacks it down against the links at her wrists.  Once, twice, three times.  It rattles painfully against her, and sends flecks of packed dirt flying into her face.  Each blow is accompanied by a sharp scraping sound, until finally, the chain breaks.

 

He lets her go at that, and she slumps embarrassingly to the floor, clutching her arms against her chest as the blood flow rushes back into them.  The boggan grunts at her and leaves again, heavy footfalls disappearing back up the tunnel.  She hears another loud _clang._

 

For a few minutes, all she really does is sit there, trying to rub the actually-extremely-painful pins and needles out of her arms, pressing gingerly at the bruises and the split, scraped skin on her wrists.  When she can finally think straight again, she shoves herself to her feet and makes a beeline for the tunnel opening.  She’s not really naïve enough to think that they’ve just let her go, but she climbs up it anyway.  It’s narrow and surprisingly long, too small to be the work of a mole, carved out in angular, jagged marks.

 

After a little while, she hits the end.  The tunnel reaches a point where it must get abruptly wider, but someone has shoved a gigantic rock in front of it, completely barring the way.  There are a few gaps at the top where rock and tunnel don’t quite meet.  When she peers through them, the only thing she can see is more tunnel.  The boggans feel a little closer, but at the same time, still too far away.

 

She braces her shoulder up against the rock, and shoves.  And _shoves_.  Her boots dig into the passage floor beneath her.  A few stray grains of earth drop from the ceiling, like pebbles.  She heaves until her head is pounding and her calves are straining, and finally – finally! – the rock moves.

 

About a millimeter, comparatively sized.

 

Then MK’s strength gives out and it rolls back into place.

 

Cursing, she slumps against it.  Her breaths have turned heavy, but no matter how much air she tries to suck in, she still feels light-headed.  _Probably not a lot of oxygen down here,_ she realizes, and forces herself closer to the tiny gaps around the top of the rock.  She wonders if anyone from the outside would be able to figure out what this stupid boulder is hiding.  Or would they just run past, assuming it was a blocked off, meaningless passageway?  What if this is Purslane’s plan – just keep her locked up until she dies or finds a way to make her queen, whichever happens first?

 

_Someone has to come,_ MK tells herself again, as the afternoon creeps along.

 

She sets up camp, so to speak, next to the boulder, folding herself into a neat little corner along the tunnel wall.  It’s marginally better than being strung up in the cell below.  She puts up her hood – more to clutch at any kind of security than for any other reason – and rests her arms on the top of her knees.

 

Despite her fears, exhaustion finally wins, and she sleeps.

 

She dreams of drifting through tunnels, just like before, and once again finds herself in Nim Galuu’s tree.  But it’s wrong this time.  It’s still and grey and empty, devoid of any exuberance or light.  Wind whistles through the hollows.  Untended pages drift through the air, sent into small tornado flurries that ruffle the fur on her hood as they whip by.  She stands in the middle of it, and realizes what she had almost figured out before – anyone looking for answers in the forest would come here, first. Anyone trying to figure out how to become a queen would look _here._

 

Nim is in danger.  Or has already met with danger, more likely.

 

Nod was at Nim’s.

 

Cold fear clenches in her chest.  Her voice echoes back at her as she calls out, hoping for a reply that she knows she won’t get.  Something crunches under one of her boots, and she looks down and sees a scroll there, dislodged from its usual place.  She leans down and reaches for it.  Her fingers close around rough parchment, brittle and fragile, stained with the long the passage of time.  Almost as if it’s really real.  It unrolls in her hands, and she blows against it.

 

A swirling black cloud erupts from the surface, glittering and dark.  Hollow screams ricochet off of the chambers around her.  The scar on her chest burns.  She drops the scroll and covers her ears.

 

Silence falls, like a shroud.  The screams stop.  The pain eases. After a moment, she lowers her hands.

 

From the cloud of darkness, a face stares back at her.  It’s rough and indistinct.  A shadow with barely discernable features, like an old painting that’s been left out in the sun and rain, until all but the broadest details have faded away.

 

“The Bright Queen is dead,” a voice that’s hers and not hers says, rasping in a barely audible whisper. She feels her lips move, though she hasn’t urged them to, and has no idea why she would say _that_ , of all things.

 

The shadow in front of her says something, but she can’t quite make it out. The words are as faded as the figure.

 

“I won’t let this happen,” she replies, as if she’d perfectly understood what was being said anyway. It feels more like she’s lip-syncing to someone else’s words, she realizes. “There is something left. One thing that still grows.”

 

She stretches her arms, and looks down, and there, at her feet, is a pod. Not _the_ pod. It’s not as large, and looks somehow frailer, pale white and battered around the edges of its petals. But it’s undeniably similar.

 

The phantom speaks again.

 

“It will have to be enough,” she says.

 

Enough for what?

 

She exhales, and she can see her own breath. A biting cold sinks into her. She honestly can’t say if she’s just noticing it for the first time now, or if it’s always been there, but Nim’s tree is _freezing_.

 

“We are two sides of the same coin.  This pod holds the last of her.  It will hold the last of me, as well.” Her words bring a rush of painful resignation. It feels like the week after her mother was diagnosed, when she first began to realize how slim her hope for survival really was. And yet, hope is still there, painful and resilient as always.

 

The shadow reaches for her, as if to grab her by the shoulders. But its hands stop short. There is a flicker of something, and the indistinct face almost _twists_ into a recognizable look of anguish.

 

She put that look there. And she can’t retract it, and she’s only going to make things worse, not better. She always makes things worse. If only she could have saved her, she had been _right there_ , she had held her in arms and been _powerless_ to do anything, powerless to grant life to someone who deserved to live, who loved living so much…

 

In her mind’s eye, she sees her mother’s face. She sees Queen Tara’s face. And she sees another face, one she doesn’t recognize but yet also _does_ , golden skin and eyes and hair, a mouth made for smiling twisted into a grimace of pain.

 

Then it passes, and she can only see the shadow in front of her.

 

“I cannot stay.  I’ll only feed the darkness, and there’s too much of it already. If this winter is to end, we must all sacrifice for the spring.”

 

The phantom speaks – no, _pleads_ with her.

 

“We’re out of time.”

 

The shadows swirl and eddy, and MK feels something brush against the backs of her fingers.  She unclenches a fist she doesn’t recall clenching, and something warm tangles with her fingers.  Looking down, she sees that the shadow has finally reached for her.

 

“Listen to me,” she whispers. She can hear the other voice, now, lying underneath hers, more melodic and beautiful and despairing than her own.  “There is more left of me than there was of her, much more.  The pod will only bloom at night.  It will belong to the darkness, as I do. But it will need to awaken in the light if the Bright Queen’s powers are to take hold.  The moon is the answer.  Make sure it blooms in the full light of the moon, and my strength will be added to her power.”

 

The grip around her hand tightens, and again, the shadow speaks in unintelligible murmurs that MK strains to understand.

 

She smiles, sadly.

 

“I know,” she says.  Then she reaches up, not of her own volition, and brushes the back of her fingers against the side of the shadow’s cheek.  “I’m sorry.”

 

The shadow says something fiercely, and, in a shocking flurry of movement, crushes itself against her.

 

It’s a strange hug. Like grasping air, except the air is shockingly strong, and warm, and smells like stale parchment and sweat and the copper tang of blood.

 

After a few shocked moments, MK looks down at the pod.  She lets go of the shadow, which releases her only reluctantly, and leans down, lifting the delicate petals into her arms.  The vines curl around her wrists, soft and fragile.  She bends forward and presses her lips to the tip of it, closing her eyes, as if it is a simple goodbye kiss.  But it’s much more than that.  All of the life rushes out of her, and it feels as though her very soul is trying to escape through her mouth.  It’s painful.  The pod shudders, the surging darkness threatening to overwhelm it.

 

Instead it curls around it, wrapping against it like a shield between the flickering light and the dangerous, unforgiving world. Colour bleeds into the battered petals, crimson red that spreads like angry veins, and then pales to a gentler pink.

 

It happens all at once.  It seems to last forever.  The wind swirls around MK, a storm of paper and ice.  The pain recedes into a distant numbness.  It’s almost peaceful, feeling her legs give out, feeling her grip lose strength, falling backwards as a pair of shadowy arms catch her.

 

Against her chest, the pod thrums with the heartbeat that is no longer behind her ribs. At her back, someone wails in despair.

 

MK jerks violently awake.

 

She sucks in a breath and puts her hand against her chest, digging under the thick fabric of her collar until she reaches warm flesh.  She presses, hard, until she feels the faint thumping against her palm.  Her mind is a whirl of panicked confusion, flying around like the scrolls in her dream had.  But… that wasn’t just a dream.  She _knows_ it.  Unfortunately, she doesn’t ‘know’ with any great clarity what it really was.  A vision?  A memory?  A possibility?  Did she really go to Nim’s tree and pick up that scroll?

 

That, at least, she’s fairly certain she didn’t do.  She wasn’t really there. Not in the flesh.

 

_What did it mean, though?_

 

Her instincts are all jumbled up.  There’s something shrieking at the very core of her, vying for her attention past a thousand ghosts that tremble and shudder behind barriers of glass and smoke.  She shudders, too, pressing her palms against her forehead.  Those people… one of them had been a queen, she knows.  The one that had spoken through her.  That was why she’d felt so connected to her.  She and the shadow had talked about another queen dying.  Tara? Or… not.  And there’d been the pod, and then the queen who had been talking through her had put her energy into it, and… died in the process.

 

But that was all wrong.  Putting her magic into the pod shouldn’t have been lethal, and it shouldn’t have even been _possible_ if the last queen had died recently; which had seemed to be the case.  She frowns to herself, the things that she ‘knows’ warring with this new information.  Outside, night has fallen, and the combination of confusion and energy makes her frustration bubble up to the surface.  After a couple of minutes, she gets to her feet and brushes herself off.

 

She paces.

 

The shadows spill out from her, but here, where she’s already buried in the dark, it doesn’t make much difference.

 

Eventually she wanders back down into the cell, and wrestles with the one thing she can almost decently grasp.  The buried-something. She moves to the very edge of the room, and presses her palms against the dirt, and _yanks._   Success comes as agonizingly slowly as it had with the rock in the tunnel, but at least in this case, it doesn’t immediately undo itself.  At some point she presses her forehead against the rough wall, too, so that she is leaning fully against it, lost somewhere in the earth, far from her own flesh and bones.

 

They leave her be until dawn again.

 

As the sun rises, she feels someone approaching, and moves away from the wall.  She’s hungry and tired and disconnected from herself, like part of her is still digging through the ground for bones.  Purslane returns with another bottle cap of water, and a battered piece of parchment in her hands.  Talking with her feels more like a dream than MK’s actual dreams did.

 

“There, now.  Aren’t I kind, letting you stretch your legs a little bit?” the boggan ringleader asks.

 

MK stares at the parchment.

 

“You went to Nim Galuu’s tree,” she replies.

 

Purslane smiles.

 

“It’s so _useful_ , being able to know anything you want.  As long as you can figure out where to look.  That part’s a little tricky.  You go digging around, trying to find deep dark magical secrets, and you get scrolls upon scrolls of rabbits doing the deed instead.”

 

“The Leafmen wouldn’t just let you in.”  She tries not to think about the implications, about what might have happened to Nim or Nod or anyone else who went there.

 

“It does keep me busy, fending them off,” Purslane admits, with a careless shrug.  “But they’ve got their hands full.  Without their queen to fix every little injury the forest takes, there’s plenty of suffering to go around, and a steadily diminishing number of hands to combat it.”

 

MK feels an unreasonable trickle of guilt slink down her spine.

 

“Oh, did I hit a nerve?  Are we feeling badly for the Great Oppressors of the forest?”

 

The idea of hitting Purslane crosses MK’s mind.  It’s a nice idea, even though, just from looking, she can tell it wouldn’t accomplish much.  Except for maybe breaking her hand. 

 

“What do you want?” she asks instead.

 

“Down to business, then,” the boggan agrees with a nod.  She holds up the parchment she brought, unfurling it with a flourish so that MK can see the scrawl of unfamiliar letters across the front. “This is our starting point.  It’s really pretty exciting.  Did you know, for example, that no one is sure what will happen if I just kill you right now?  Anything could happen!  Maybe I would steal your powers.  Maybe the whole forest would die.  Maybe it would spring back to life, even!  No one knows because no one’s ever killed a queen before she could imbue a pod.”

 

Purslane grins, revealing her sharp, uneven teeth.

 

“Don’t worry, though.  Outright killing you is more of a last-resort plan at the moment.  It’s kind of hard to fix it, after all, if it doesn’t work out.”  She winks, and then looks back at the parchment, almost fondly.  “I was starting to get disheartened, you know.  The forest apparently has a history of keeping to the status quo a lot.  Old queen steps down, new queen steps up, boggan plans for glory and greatness get thwarted, lather, rinse, repeat.  I was just thinking to myself, ‘where’s the ambition?  Where are the great success stories?  The bold heroes that mothers always tell their little grubs about?’ when I found it.”

 

MK goes cold.  Whatever Purslane has found, she doubts that it’s good news for her.

 

“Found what?” she asks.

 

“Oh, it was a great read,” Purslane assures her.  “A little old fashioned, but beggars can’t be choosers, and there was plenty of meat on the bones.  See – and this is the only part that makes me a little sad – I’m not the first person to have my brilliant idea.”  She gestures with the parchment as she talks, moving around the cell.  It almost seems like she’s distracted, but MK notices that her eyes never leave her, even while she moves.  “A long time ago, there was this surprisingly visionary young boggan whose name has sadly been lost to the ravages of a genuine termite infestation.  I’ve been calling him Wormwood in my head.  Well, Wormwood, or whoever he was, decided that he liked the idea of being queen.  Possibly he intended to change the title to king after he’d secured it, but then again, maybe not.  Who am I to judge?  Either way, Wormwood was entirely unaware of the whole ‘pod blooming in darkness’ corollary to the line of succession. Which means he was substantially more creative about the whole process of stealing the queen’s power than Mandrake could have ever hoped to be.”

 

“I don’t know.  The giant cloud of bats was pretty ingenious,” MK points out, for the sake of fairness.

 

Purslane rolls her eyes.

 

“Please.  If he’d wanted to be smart about things, he would have taken the pod to some remote outpost where the Leafmen never would have even _thought_ to look for it, not brought it straight back home and just waited for them to come,” she declares.  “But let’s not waste time talking about my woefully inept predecessor.  If _he’d_ captured you, you would have escaped and probably killed one or two of his family members by now.”

 

“I’m starting to regret not setting him free,” MK mutters.

 

“Oh, but you and I have a _rapport,_ ” Purslane insists, gesturing between them.

 

“No we don’t.”

 

“Yes we do.”

 

“No we don’t.”

 

“Yes we do.  See, this brilliant back-and-forth is just the kind of thing I’m talking about.  So shut up before I break your jaw.”  One of her fists clenches pointedly, a contrast to the casual stance of the rest of her body.

 

MK shuts up.

 

“Good,” Purslane decides, with a nod.  “Now, as I was saying before we got tragically sidetracked – Wormwood figured out, in a fit of brilliance, that if the queen’s magic could be transferred from queen to queen, then it was probably also possible to direct it somewhere else.  Just like Mandrake, he decided to target the queen at the time when she was selecting her silly little flower pod.  He killed her and nearly got away with the pod, but the Leafmen interfered at the last second.  What he _did_ end up with was one of the vines.  Just a single vine.  Now I know you’re thinking, ‘but Purslane, just one vine doesn’t sound terribly impressive’, and you’re right.  On the surface, it’s not much.  It’s what he did with it afterwards that interests me.”

 

“Can we just get to the point?” MK wonders.

 

“No,” Purslane replies.  “Half of the idiots I deal with every day are barely capable of speaking without drooling at the same time, and even the ones who possess the barest modicum of intelligence are generally too intimidated by me to show it.  So I am going to _savour_ the opportunity to talk to someone who clearly understands what I am saying, and you are going to stand there and deal with it, because you’re my prisoner and you have no choice.”

 

She blinks.

 

“Well.  When you put it like _that_ …”

 

“Mother always said I had a gift for phrasing things aptly,” her captor cheerfully declares.  “Of course she also used to say that if I didn’t stop talking and get back to work, she’d feed me to the chipmunks.  She was a complex woman.”

 

“I’ll bet.”

 

“Almost as complex as dear Wormwood, who, near as I can tell, must have had a mind like a maze.  He took one tiny little vine of queenly magic, and he _did_ something to it.  Something unexpected.  He figured out, somehow, that there was a duality to the queen’s magic.  I say ‘something’ and ‘somehow’ because, while I have managed to glean a little bit about the end results, the part of the records detailing his processes has proven… more difficult.”

 

“Did termites eat it?” MK wonders.

 

“No, no,” Purlsane replies, brandishing her scroll once more.  “This is it right here, actually.  Written out in all of its incomprehensible glory.”

 

On the off chance that she might get away with it, MK takes a step forward and reaches for the scroll.  But Purslane immediately pulls it back and out of her reach, tutting lightly.

 

“Ah-ah, no, not yet,” she says.  “Not until I’m sure you won’t do something incredibly foolish with it.  You see, for some reason, this little scrap of scroll is written in words that no one seems to recognize.  A code, maybe.  But I thought to myself, ‘you know who will have access to all kinds of odd secrets?  The queen!’  So here’s what we’re going to do – you’re going to tell me what this scroll says.  You’re not going to lie, you’re not going to try and trick me, you’re not going to destroy it, and you’re not going to spare any details.  Whatever Wormwood did managed to turn the root of a queen’s sacred flower pod into the ancient staff that you so foolishly destroyed.  I want to know _how_ , in every single nuance, mishap, and unlikely success.”

 

MK stares incredulously at her.

 

“You want me to _help_ you figure out a way to steal my magic and kill me?” she asks.

 

“You’re resistant to the idea,” Purslane notes, nodding to herself.  “It’s alright.  I understand.  I wouldn’t be particularly big on it if I were in your shoes either.  That’s why I’ve brought you some incentive.”  She turns slightly towards the tunnel, then, and whistles three sharp notes.  They carry surprisingly far.  A few moments later, MK senses something moving closer.  Several somethings.  Several dark somethings…

 

…and one itchy, incongruous, bright one.

 

_Oh no,_ she thinks.

 

Two mammoth-sized boggans emerge from the tunnel, dragging a familiar figure between them.  Her heart clenches in an odd mixture of relief and despair – it isn’t Nod, and it isn’t Ronin, or Nim, all of whom she’d been fearful for.  The squat, dark brown figure glistens slightly, whining as one of the boggans drags him along by his eyestalk.  Both boggans are dressed as plainly as Purslane is, in keeping with what she’s gradually coming to expect.  But she can feel… something.  Almost.  A little bit.

 

“Mub,” she says, distracted from that last thought by the arrival of her friend.  He looks towards her, and his expression momentarily brightens.

 

“Hey, girl,” he greets.  “I knew it, I said you weren’t a traitor, I knew they musta been keeping you somewhere.  Man.  That Ronin guy is one terrible bodyguard.  Well don’t you worry, I’ll get us out of here.”

 

Purslane glances between them, clearly fascinated.

 

“He said he was your boyfriend,” she tells MK.  “Is it true?”

 

“Uh.  No,” MK replies.

 

Mub shifts a little.

 

“Okay, so maybe we never, like, _officially_ started dating-” he begins, before his guard gives one of his eyestalks a sharp tug and sidetracks him.  MK glances towards the guard at the motion, and she feels it, again.  A little pinprick of death calling to her attention.  His tunic shifts, she spies a small line of leather at his neck; teeth and tiny bones strung up along a thin strip that he has neglected to take off.

 

Purslane leans closer.

 

“Between you and me, I think you can do a little bit better,” she whispers conspiratorially.  “Or you could, if I wasn’t planning on killing you.  Oh, darn.  I made myself sad.”

 

“You could always not kill me,” MK suggests.

 

Purslane actually looks a little regretful.

 

“Look, let’s be realistic here.  I’m going to do some pretty terrible things to you.  The odds are good that even _if_ you miraculously survive them somehow, you’ll probably just be left as a shallow, broken husk of a creature with no will to live anyway,” she insists.  “But I’ll tell you what.  You do everything I ask, you cooperate with everything I tell you to do, you become the model prisoner, and _maybe_ , I’ll let _him_ live.”

 

She gestures towards Mub.

 

“Oh.  I see what this is,” Mub says.  “You’re trying to use her obvious feelings for me against her.  That’s low.  That’s really low.  That’s like, sometimes when I slime over one of Grub’s slime trails that’s already been there for a while and it’s gone all dried up but you can still see it and there’s little bits of dirt in it, it’s like you’re the bits of dirt that are stuck in the slime trail _beneath_ my slime trail.  That’s how low that is.”

 

Purslane gestures, and one of the guards produces a large rock.

 

“Alternatively, I could have him beaten to death.  I’ll understand if you would prefer to just let me beat him to death.  Actually, you know what?  We’ll just do that, and I’ll find another, better prisoner and come back and start over with him instead. I’m sorry I even tried this, it’s a little embarrassing.”

 

The guard raises his rock.

 

“No!” MK shouts, instinctively reaching for the necklace that the other one is wearing.  She stops herself from yanking it just in time, holds back as Purslane gestures again, and the rock halts midair.

 

The boggan leader looks a little put-out.

 

_“Really?”_ she asks.  “You want to keep him?  Really?”

 

“He’s my friend,” MK says.

 

“Girl’s obviously got an appreciation for this moist, full-bodied, three-hundred-and-sixty-degree-sighted god of all things _fine_ ,” Mub asserts, twirling his eyestalks pointedly.

 

There is a moment of awkward silence.

 

“If he can’t stay quiet, I’m killing him anyway.  I nearly killed him six times on the way here,” Purslane warns.

 

“Zip it, Mub.”

 

“Yeah, okay,” Mub agrees, warily eyeing the boggans around him.  “But only because _you_ asked.”

 

MK sighs and gestures for Purslane to hand her the scroll.  There’s a leaden feeling of dread in her gut, heavy enough that it’s chasing away the distant, disconnected feelings between her mind and her body.  Purslane eyes her warily for several seconds.

 

“I don’t know,” she says.  “I’m not really sure I believe that _he_ is incentive enough for you to behave.”

 

“That’s because you don’t understand the power of love,” Mub asserts.  “Not that I’m gonna be completely tied down, though – this much fabulousness can’t just go off the market.  It’d get ugly.  There’d be _riots_.  I mean, more riots.”

 

“Mub.”

 

“Right.  Sorry.  Being quiet now.”

 

MK rolls her eyes.

 

“I’m not going to do anything to get Mub killed,” she insists, her arm still extended expectantly.  Slowly, carefully, the ties on the back of the boggan guard’s necklace begin to unravel themselves.  It’s a force of will, staring at Purslane and untying the necklace and trying not to panic or let anything show.  She clings to her feeling of detachment, tries to hover somewhere above the whole thing.  Several long, tense seconds of indecision drag out between them. A bead of sweat crawls its way down the back of her neck.

 

Finally, Purslane hands her the scroll.

 

“Try anything, and he dies.  Painfully.  And then I go and find another prisoner, and we start all over again from square one,” she declares.

 

MK swallows past the dryness in her throat.

 

“Got it,” she agrees.  Then she looks down.

 

It’s gibberish.  It reminds her of a kid in her grade five class who’d been obsessed with fantasy books, and used to scribble ‘runes’ all over his notebook covers and the inside of his desk.  The lines are faint, jagged and straight-edged, except where the hand that wrote them seemed to wobble in places.  _That’s wrong_ , she thinks.  The script should be uniform and neat, the magic creating it keeping it as crisp as any computer printer would.  Her eyes scan over the whole of it, noticing the places where the ink has left blots, where the letters get too big or too small, cram closer to the edges, and shrink or spread to accommodate them.  It’s all she can notice, because none of the writing is remotely comprehensible.

 

This isn’t one of Nim’s scrolls.

 

“Well?” Purslane demands, folding her scarred arms impatiently.

 

“I need time,” MK tells her.

 

“You don’t have any,” her captor informs her.  “Tell me what it says, or we find out how many blows it takes to beat a slug to death.”  She raises a fist, and the boggan guard eagerly lifts his rock again.

 

MK’s fingers tighten around the edges of the scroll.

 

“Look,” she says.  “I can’t just read it.  Have you ever tried to translate something through the vague accumulated knowledge of about a dozen dead queens who prefer to communicate through impressions and concepts of universal balance?”

 

“Can’t say that I have.”

 

“It’s very slow going,” MK insists.  “Especially in the dark.  And you want me to do a good job, right?  Not make any mistakes?”

 

Purslane visibly wavers.

 

“How long are we talking about here?” she asks, glancing back towards the tunnel, her mouth thinning into a tight, unhappy line.

 

“I’m not sure.  A couple of days, maybe?  This is my first time translating code for somebody.”

 

“You have until noon,” Purslane declares.  “Then you give me something, or I start getting _creative._ ”

 

MK remembers the fox – its pain-wracked body, a thousand little pinpricks cutting into its hide, pulling at its fur, driving it slowly mad even as they broke it into obedience.

 

“Got it,” she says.

 

“You can keep the slug for now.  Just because I’m nice like that.”

 

_Or because you don’t want to climb back up the tunnel with him_ , MK thinks, but doesn’t say.  She’s not going to complain about it.  The boggan guards shove at Mub as they pass him by, following after Purslane as she ducks into the tunnel again.  As the last one walks through, putting his head down, MK wiggles her fingers and the bone and leather necklace sloooowly slips away, catching onto the rock at the side of the tunnel opening and staying put while he moves forward.  Mub spies it and does a double-take.

 

“Wow,” he says.

 

MK gestures at him to be quiet, and the guard turns – thankfully, moving in the direction opposite of his dangling necklace.  Mub blinks at him, and then grins.

 

“I didn’t think it was possible, but you’re even worse going than coming.  What do you freaks eat?  ‘Cause whatever it is, it’s not doing your lumpy grey butts any favours.  And neither is that tunic.”  He snickers to himself, and the boggan growls.

 

“Ignore him,” Purslane snaps back.

 

With obvious reluctance, the guard turns away again – thankfully still missing the dangling necklace – and leaves with the rest.

 

As soon as they’re out of sight, MK whips her fingers forward, and the thin strip of leather lands in her free hand.  She stares at the tiny bits of bone and teeth along it.  The teeth are harder for her to read than the bone, for some reason, but it’s substantial and _present_ and it feels surprisingly good to have it, after so many hours of only distant little tremors and far-away impressions.  Unfortunately, none of them look very sharp or like they’d make for good weapons.  Most of the broken edges have been worn smooth, either with time or effort.

 

There’s a crashing sound as the boulder at the end of the tunnel rolls back into place.

 

Mub clears his throat.

 

“How’d you do that?” he asks.

 

MK glances around, like she half expects to see someone listening in, even though she knows that Mub’s the only being who’s still close by.

 

“I can sort of move dead things around,” she tells him.

 

“Huh.  That’s kinda creepy,” he replies.  “Kinda hot, too.  You are really rocking this whole spooky queen business.  Y’know, I always had a thing for bad girls…”

  
“Mub,” she interrupts.  “What’s going on?  This isn’t one of Nim’s scrolls.  How’d they catch you?  Is everyone okay?”  Her voice catches slightly on the last question.

 

Mub slides closer to her.

 

“Well, obviously, this is part of my master plan to rescue you,” he says.  “Don’t worry.  Everybody’s fine.  Even Flatface, who’s still terminally stupid and incapable of looking behind his own head.  Also Ronin is being a jerk.  Dude has no sense of humour, but that’s not exactly news, I guess.  Business as usual, really.”

 

“Maybe you’d better start at the beginning,” she suggests.

 

Mub blows out a heavy breath.

 

“Okay, but that’s gonna take a while,” he warns.  “So, Grub and I were over at the pond, looking after the pods, and we were getting them ready so Queen Tara could pick one, and Grub was all ‘this is my chance to finally impress the Leafmen!’ and I was all ‘pshaw, Leafmen nothin’, what do you want to impress them for?’ and there were all these petals on the water and the queen used them to-”

 

“Not that beginning,” MK interrupts, resisting the urge to grit her teeth.  “Start with whatever happened after the boggans kidnapped me.”

 

“Well, I mean, I guess if you want me to start there I could make it work, but then the story’s gonna miss a lot of crucial context.”

 

“Mub.”

 

She glares.

 

“Okay, okay, wow, look at you all scary _and_ sexy.  Not gonna lie, it works for me,” he says, and she wonders why it is that her life is filled with people who are incapable of brevity.  Except for Ronin, who is possibly a little bit _too_ prone to it.

 

“You realize that when Purse-Lane gets back, she’s probably going to kill you,” she points out.

 

“Don’t freak out.  It’s all good,” Mub assures her.  “So you disappeared out of Moonhaven, right?  Like maybe next time leave a note or something by the way.  So Ronin went to go and look for you at your dad’s house, and Flatface wanted to check out Nim’s tree, and Grub was all like ‘let’s go with him’ and I was like ‘naw, man, she’ll be back, my girl can’t keep away for long’ but he was freaking out so I was just like ‘okay, we’ll go, calm down’ and we went and the place was _crawling_ with boggans but we found Nim outside – I guess he was smart enough not to just walk up to the boggan-infested tree like Flatface almost did – and _he_ was freaking out and he said he hadn’t seen you so Flatface figured you’d gone someplace else, and he was gonna leave, and Grub was like all ‘it’s a Leafman’s duty to protect the forest’ and blah blah blah, stuff about not just letting the boggans have the tree, so we stayed to try and help start up a rebellion or something, I dunno, I fell asleep, and Nim went to back to Moonhaven to get help and see if you’d turned up, and he came back with like fifty dudes and Ronin, and they were back to doing their whole angry thing, and Ronin was like all ‘we need to take back the tree so the scrolls can tell us where the boggans have MK’, and I was like ‘what, the boggans have MK?’ and he was like ‘yeah’ and Flatface was all ‘you suck so hard, you can’t even do your job right’ and I was all ‘chill, dudes, I got this’ and everybody was all like ‘I’m so glad Mub is here to help’ but all these other jinn were just like ‘how can they be holding the queen captive?  I bet she just switched sides ‘cause she’s evil and stuff’ and I was all ‘what’d you say about my girl?’ and there was a fight and I kicked all their butts, not gonna lie, it was pretty cool, but then the boggans captured Nim and that was a downer, I mean, that’s a lot of kidnappings to deal with, but don’t worry we got him back, and he said he’d sort of figured out what the boggans were looking for, so he’d made up this fake scroll while they had him and implied that you’d maybe be able to read it, so they’d take it to you, but then everybody was like all ‘how do we follow them?’ and I was like all ‘chill, I got this’ and I _let_ them take me prisoner and left my slime trail for Grub to follow, and they’re gonna be here and bust us out soon, no problem.”

 

MK blinks, and looks down at the scroll.

 

“So this is…?”

 

“Grocery list written in gnomish.”

 

“You guys are really big on convoluted plans,” MK decides.  Nevertheless, she feels a sudden surge of relief wash through her.  They’re coming.  They’re not just going to leave her.

 

“How long will it take them to get here, do you think?” she wonders.

 

“I dunno.  We kinda flew for most of it, so… maybe a while.”

 

“Wait,” MK frowns.  “How could you leave a slime trail if you were flying?”

 

Mub shrugs.

 

“So it’s possible that it wasn’t a _completely_ foolproof plan,” he concedes.

 

She stares at him in mute horror.

 

“But Purse-Lane is coming back at noon to kill you,” she points out.  “Unless this scroll magically changes into something useful between then and now, and even if it does, somehow, she’ll probably just kill you anyway.”

 

“Re _lax_ ,” Mub advises.  “If she comes back before the other guys get here, I’ll just pour on the charm.  This voice can melt even the coldest of female hearts.  Try not to get jealous.  Just remember, it’s all a ruse, baby.  Alllll part of the plan.”

 

“Oh god, she’s going to beat you to death,” MK realizes.  “I’m going to have to watch you die.  And then I’m probably going to use your corpse like a puppet to help me try and escape.  This is going to be so traumatic.  I’m not even going to be able to buy a book on how to deal with the trauma of this, because there are no books here!  There are no therapists!  I am going to need so much therapy that I am never going to get, Mub!  I think I already need therapy.  I am holding a handful of teeth and bones and right now it is the single most comforting thing in the whole room.”

 

She starts pacing around the room.  Mub’s eyestalks follow her movements.

 

“You’re freaking out kinda intensely,” he notes.

 

“This is my first time being _imprisoned_.  It’s _stressful,_ ” she replies.

 

“Nah, it’s just boring, really.  Nothing to do but wait.”

 

MK flails.

 

“In a couple of hours someone is going to turn up and try to kill you, and you’re not going to freak out even just a little?” she asks.

 

Mub shrugs.

 

“I’m not dead _yet_ ,” he tells her.  “So what’s the point?  Not like freaking out’s gonna help.”

 

She pauses, staring at him in mild incredulity.

 

“That was… surprisingly insightful,” she notes.

 

“I am a _fountain_ of wisdom,” Mub assures her, twisting his eyeballs around so he can stare at himself.  He chuckles.

 

MK shakes her head and forces herself to take deep, even breaths.  As bizarre as the situation may be, Mub has a good point.  She’s not going to accomplish anything by letting her fear get the better of her.  The bone necklace clinks slightly, two pieces clacking together, and she worries them between her fingers.  She remembers, vaguely, a story that her dad told her when she was small, about some guy who buried a bunch of dragons’ teeth in the ground.  When the teeth were planted, they grew into an army of skeletons.

 

_That would be really useful right now,_ she thinks.

 

Her gaze turns back towards the far wall of her cell.  With the sun rising over the horizon, she can barely feel her deeply-buried target anymore.  But it’s still there, a little closer than it was before, and somehow, holding the necklace in her hand makes the other bones seem that much more attainable.  Whether rescue is coming or not, that doesn’t mean she has to just sit around and watch Mub play with his eyeballs.

 

“What’re you doing?” Mub asks, as she strides forward and places her palms against packed earth again.

 

“You’re… hugging the wall?” he guesses, when she puts her forehead against it as well.

 

“Okay.  Uh.  I’m just gonna put this out there, but if you’re hard-up for some affection, there’s a whole lotta slug right over here who’d be willing to share.”

 

“Shush,” MK replies.

 

“Did you just _shush_ me?  I come all this way to rescue you, and you _shush_ me?  Not cool, baby.  Not.  Cool.”

 

She tunes him out in favour of concentrating.  There has to be something more she can do, other than just trying to _move_ the thing.  She knows there is.  Now that she’s looking for it, she can feel the shape of the concept, even though the specifics are eluding her.  Like the phantom in her dream.  Like the questions that sink down inside her, not ‘known’ but not quite unanswered, either.  She wonders just how much there is to search through inside of her now.  She wonders how much of her is really still _herself_ , underneath the surface.

 

Disquieting silence is her only answer.

 

_You’ve got a mind of your own, MK – use it,_ she thinks to herself, in a voice reminiscent of her mother’s.

 

Maybe she’s been relying too much on her new instincts to guide her.  It was a safe bet, she knows, since her standard public highschool education hasn’t exactly done much to prepare her for things like being shrunk to the size of a bug or getting magical superpowers, but it’s not like Queen Tara was infallible.  Crazily well-prepared, yes, but MK refuses to believe that her predecessor _chose_ to get shot out of the sky by Mandrake right before Ronin’s eyes.  So, that leaves good old fashioned logic and reason – her oldest friends, always at her disposal just so long as she remembers to use them.

 

Tara could make things grow.  She could also make things shrink, obviously, but the transformative magic is connected, MK knows.  Though the size differences make it strange to think about, what Tara technically did was ‘grow’ her into a new shape.  Living things are constantly changing.  Once upon a time, MK had been much smaller than she is now; but then she’d grown, and her shape had changed, as part of the natural course of her life.  As a living being, she could always be changed again. Magic just let Tara change her into a shape of _her_ choosing rather than nature’s.

 

Death changes things, too.  There is a cycle to deterioration.  Age slowly wears down the components of a living being until they can no longer function as they should.  Illness… illness damages things before time can do it for them, to similar effect.  Violence does as well.  Infection eats away at things like a predatory beast.  Maybe _she_ can change things, too.

 

Just not in the same way.

 

She’s been trying to yank her target through the deep, hard-packed earth around her cell, like dragging a heavy dresser across a carpeted floor.  But that’s stupid, she realizes.  She didn’t just yank on those floorboards back in her dad’s house, or tug at the infection in the Leafmen back at Moonhaven.  She reshaped the things under her command, too.  Unconsciously, but effectively.  A dresser is easier to move when you pull out all of the drawers.

 

She spreads her fingers wide.  Her target struggles, strains, and then breaks apart; a thousand tiny splinters of bone that begin tunneling towards her, like morbid little earthworms digging through the ground.  She sees a shape, briefly, gets an impression of sharp teeth and hot breath, a tired doe racing through the trees only to be caught, a vice of teeth closing around her throat as she falls.  First the predators and then the scavengers pick her clean, and time buries her bones under snow and leaves and fresh growth, the earth swallowing her up in slow seconds until a small landslide does the rest of the work.  Time, relentless time, hiding her away.

 

It’s still slow going, getting those splinters to move.  But they’re really moving, now, and MK smiles because she _has_ it.  She has the fractured pieces of a long-dead deer skull.  And with those, strangely enough, she has success.

 

Now she just needs to make sure she has it _in time._

 

“Not to cramp your style or anything, but I’m starting to get a little creeped out here,” Mub’s words drift through to her.

 

MK finally takes pity on him.  “I’m doing something,” she tells him.  Her own voice sounds very far away to her ears.

 

“What?  Smashing your face up against the dirt?” he guesses.  “Cause that’s what it looks like from here.  You and the wall, having this fling right in front of me – wait, hold up, are you trying to make me _jealous?_   Is that it?  Trying to get a rise out of me because of what I said earlier about commitment?  Aw, baby, you don’t need to play games -”

 

She goes back to tuning him out again at that point, and feels pretty guilt-free about it.

 

Like boney worms, the skull fragments burrow towards them.  After a while her head starts throbbing, and her muscles start trembling, and she can’t tell how much time has passed, exactly, but Mub keeps talking.  Somewhere far away the sun is blazing, and MK feels like she’s on the last leg of a marathon.  She slides down to her knees, digging her fingers into the earth, trying to get just a little bit more… just a little bit _further…_

 

She doesn’t feel the tremors, at first.  It’s hard to, when her arms are shaking just as fiercely on their own accord.  But she feels the rush of it, the _presence,_ and her eyes open – when did she close them? – and Mub is uncommonly quiet as her lips curve into an exhausted smile, and then the earth _breaks._   Spears of bone thrust into the tiny cell. In a flurry of panic, she only just barely stops them from impaling Mub or herself, falling back as she wills them to curve away instead.

 

Mub stares at her with wide eyes, peering over top of a bone spear that’s landed directly beside him.

 

“Whoa,” he says.


End file.
